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THE LOWER SOUTH 

IN AMERICAN HISTORY 



-y^^y^ 



THE LOWER SOUTH 



IN 



AMERICAN HISTORY 



BY 



WILLIAM GARROTT BROWN 

LECTURER IN HISTORY AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY 
FOR THE YEAR I90I-2 

AUTHOR OF "A HISTORY OF ALABAMA," "ANDREW 
JACKSON," " STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS," ETC. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON : MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
1902 

All rights reserved 






Tr\=. liS-ARV OF 

CONGRESS. 
T-iMO CowcB Received 

MAY. 12 1902 

COPVRIQHT ENTRY 

CtAS* '^ XXc No. 
OOPY B. 



Copyright, 1902, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped May, 1902. 






NorisooU i^resa 

J. S. Cushin^ & Co. — Berwick & Smith. 
Norwood Mass. U.S.A. 



WILSON RICHARD BROWN 

EUGENE LEVERT BROWN 

a2Sf)0 stooU mnt t0 let me pass 



PREFACE 

The substance of the first three papers in this 
volume has been given in the form of public lectures 
at Harvard University and at various Southern 
colleges. The three essays which follow are re- 
printed by the consent of the publishers of The 
Atlantic Monthly, and are but slightly changed 
from the form in which they appeared in that 
magazine. The other two papers have not been 
published before. No one but myself is respon- 
sible for any opinions or any errors, but I am 
indebted to many persons, North and South, for 
facts, for suggestions, and for criticism. The 
criticisms of Professor Guy Stevens Callender, of 
Bowdoin College, on the title essay, were particu- 
larly helpful. 

There is something I might say by way of 
apology for the thin and fragmentary effect 
which the whole must have, but my impulse is 
to leave it unsaid, and to say, instead, what the 
slight hope is which I have in the book. The 



viii PREFACE 

utmost it can accomplish is to sketch what now I 
cannot paint ; to give an earnest of what waits on 
circumstance. For my true task, Uke many another 
task of many another man, must wait for better 
days : for days of confident mornings and calm 
evenings. Such his days and nights must be, and 
firm his will must be, his mind at peace, his 
silence undistracted, who would enter into the 
body of this civiHzation which I have tried to inti- 
mate with outlines, and make it live again through 
these and other of its times and seasons, he also 
living in it, and dying in it, and rising in it again. 
For that, and nothing less, is the demand it makes 
of its historian. 

It will be something if these papers shall make 
it plain that my subject is a true body of human 
life, — a thing, and not a mass of facts, a topic in 
political science, an object lesson in large morali- 
ties. To know the thing itself should be our 
study; and the right study of it is thought and pas- 
sion, not research alone. For this, like every other 
great and tragical human thing, passes forever 
into the mind and character and life of whosoever 
touches it, though he touch it never so lightly. 
If he himself be born of it, then he inherits all its 
past. It will forever strain him forth beyond his 



PREFACE ix 

narrow bounds of individual experience ; darken 
his doubt into bewilderment ; insist upon its share 
in his achievement; echo with its Appomatox his 
little failures and surrenders. There is no other 
such thing in the world. An eminent man of pur- 
pose, who will never condone a tragedy, called it 
once " the saddest fact in all the world," — and 
felt not, perhaps, how many dreary lives he com- 
passed with his phrase. 

And yet, it compensates sometimes, even while 
it damns. I have come out of it and stood apart, 
and it drew me back with a most potent charm. 
Through and through it I have plunged, — from 
end to end of it in history, from end to end of 
it in physical dimension. Emerging on the other 
side of it, I stood on the-' long hill by San An- 
tonio, the low, gray cross of the Alamo beneath me, 
where once in death it grimly triumphed, and 
looked back upon it, and cursed it, and blessed the 
flag of the Republic, fluttering there on Fort Sam 
Houston, for a sign of the stronger and better thing 
that overthrew it. Nevertheless, there also it per- 
sisted, conquerable but indestructible, stretching 
thence back over the dark lands about the Gulf, 
the Georgian hills, the Carolinian rice swamps, on 
to the Potomac and the Virginian lowlands, where 



X PREFACE 

the first acquiescence was, and the first ease, and 
the first slow working out of sin. And then — I 
turned to the westward; and to me, as to Ober- 
mann on his Alp, as to every man, greater or 
less, who takes upon him the burden of a mys- 
tery too heavy for his weak heart, there came once 
more, unsought, unreasoned, hateful, the old reac- 
tion and resurrection from despair. Once more, 
with eyes like theirs who from the Alamo looked 
out upon the Spaniard, — like hers, the sweet- 
voiced child's beside me, heiress, as I am heir, to 
all the sorrow and all the tortured pride of it, — 
once more, defiantly and gently, I faced the future, 
charged with whatever repetitions, whatever fresh 
bewilderments, over the Texan plains. 

Cambridge, 
April 24, 1902. 



CONTENTS 

I. The Lower South in American History 
(I 820-1 860) 

1. The Rise of the Cotton States . 

2. The Ascendency of the Lower South 

IN THE Union .... 



3. The Final Struggle in the Union 

IL The Orator of Secession 
in. The ^Resources of the Confederacy . 
IV. The Ku Klux Movement 

V. A New Hero of an Old Type 
VI. Shifting the White Man's Burden 



3 
3 

50 
83 
115 
155 
191 
229 
247 



I. THE LOWER SOUTH 



THE LOWER SOUTH IN 
AMERICAN HISTORY 

(1820-1860) 

THE RISE OF THE COTTON STATES 

I WISH to discuss very broadly a certain quarter 
of the Union and the part it played in a certain 
period of American history; to describe a region 
commonly regarded as a sort of Nazareth, out of 
which only tasks and perplexities have come; to 
examine a civilization which many have looked 
upon as foreign to American ideas; to review a 
political enterprise which has often been con- 
demned as contrary to American principles. My 
aim is neither to defend nor to arraign. I wish 
to inquire whether that civilization and that 
political enterprise were a natural outcome of 
material conditions and of what went before, not 
whether they were right or wrong. I wish to 
inquire whether the men and women of that 
time and region had the ordinary qualities of 

3 



4 THE LOWER SOUTH 

human nature, not whether they were better or 
worse than the men and women of other lands and 
times. 

The region I have in mind is the southernmost 
part of the United States, and is oftenest desig- 
nated nowadays as the Cotton States ; formerly, it 
was sometimes called the Cotton Kingdom. The 
period is the long period of material development, 
of territorial expansion, and of domestic contro- 
versy, from the admission of Missouri in 1820 to 
the secession of South Carolina in i860. 

Only two of the states included in this region, 
South Carolina and Georgia, were of the original 
thirteen. The early history of the others, though 
curious and interesting, is not much dwelt upon in 
the formal histories of the United States. One 
learns from these that Spanish adventurers, the 
immediate successors of Columbus, explored the 
coasts of the Mexican Gulf ; that De Leon was in 
Florida ; that De Soto made a cruel, heroic, boot- 
less march from the Savannah to the Mississippi, 
and was buried in the great river of the West; 
that Mobile and New Orleans were settled by the 
French. One knows, of course, that the great 
Louisiana Territory was bought from Napoleon in 
1803, and one remembers rather vaguely that there 



THE LOWER SOUTH 5 

was a boundary controversy with Spain about West 
Florida, and that both the Floridas came finally to 
the United States in 1819. Then one ceases to 
think of the Gulf states except as a part of "the 
South." They are put into a group with the Caro- 
linas and Virginia and Kentucky. If a particular 
Southern state is singled out for a representative, 
it is apt to be Virginia, as the oldest. 

Yet the lower South differed materially from 
the upper South: not so much as Virginia differed 
from Massachusetts, but quite enough to make it 
necessary for us to distinguish between the two 
groups of Southern states. Let us begin, how- 
ever, with a word or two about the differences 
between Virginia and the whole South, on the 
one hand, and Massachusetts and the whole 
North, on the other. It will be necessary to 
repeat some things which have often been said 
before, and it will not be necessary to controvert 
seriously the opinions maintained by recent writers 
of history. 

The differences were not plainly racial. There 
were no race elements of any importance to be 
found in the Southern country which were not 
also represented in the East and North. The 
main stock, North and South, was, of course. 



6 THE LOWER SOUTH 

English, and it is not even true, speaking broadly, 
that Virginia and the Carolinas were peopled from 
one rank of English society and New England 
from another. To contrast the Puritan and the 
Cavalier, somewhat as Macaulay did in his brill- 
iant essay on Milton, and to dramatize our long 
sectional controversy into a picturesque conflict 
between Virginian Ruperts and New England 
Cromwells, is a rhetorical opportunity which our 
occasional orators and our more literary historians 
have seldom foregone. That Massachusetts was 
settled mainly by preachers and tinkers is still 
a prevalent notion in the South, while the cor- 
responding notion that the early Virginians were 
mainly cadets of noble houses is also still en- 
tertained, though of late years Eastern writers 
have often intimated that even distinguished Vir- 
ginian families are sprung from indentured ser- 
vants. Neither the Southern boast nor the Eastern 
sneer is justified by a careful investigation of the 
facts. President Tyler, of WilHam and Mary Col- 
lege, the foremost of Virginian antiquaries, after 
long study of many genealogies, finds himself dis- 
tinctly reassured as to the quality of early immi- 
gration. A fair judgment, perhaps, is that the 
nobility and the country gentry were represented 



THE LOWER SOUTH y 

in Virginia in about the same proportions as in 
Old England. But the English middle class, 
from which New England drew the mass of her 
colonial population, though to the southward also 
it was represented more fully than any other 
class, was not so well represented there as in 
New England. The truth seems to be that the 
top and the bottom of EngHsh society, and not 
the middle only, were drawn upon to people Vir- 
ginia, while New England was stocked almost 
wholly from the middle parts. If one struck 
a balance, the two colonial groups were very 
nearly on a par in the matter of the Enghsh 
blood in them. The distinction which Virginia 
had in her upper class was balanced by the 
greater homogeneity of New England's popula- 
tion and the comparative unimportance there of 
the lowest class of Englishmen. 

So, too, of the other race elements. The Afri- 
can, who from the first took his place below the 
lowest of the whites in Virginia, was found in 
colonial Massachusetts also, though there was 
never any great demand for him there, or any 
economic excuse for his presence there; and in 
both colonies he was a slave. French Hugue- 
nots, coming in considerable numbers to the 



8 THE LOWER SOUTH 

Carolinas, spread westward and southward. But 
there were French Huguenots in New England 
also, and the names of certain colonial worthies 
of that strain, albeit their original owners might 
not recognize them as we pronounce them now- 
adays, still designate many streets and public 
places of Boston and other New England cities. 
The Scotch-Irish, perhaps, in proportion to num- 
bers, the most notable of all our race elements, par- 
ticularly when one considers the leaders they have 
given to our legislatures and our armies, were 
strong in the western parts of Virginia and North 
Carolina, whence they helped to people Tennes- 
see, and in fact they spread over the whole South, 
usually clinging together in small communities, to 
which they gave a character of industry and sta- 
bility. But no one needs to be told how strong 
that element always was in New England, and 
particularly in New Hampshire, where many a 
colonial household went back for its heroic mem- 
ories, not to any English battlefield, but to what 
was often called merely "the siege," meaning 
always the siege of Londonderry. Men shaped 
in the physical mould of Andrew Jackson and 
John C. Calhoun were to be met on many a vil- 
lage street in northern New England, as they 



THE LOWER SOUTH 9 

were in the more thriving country towns of the 
South. CathoHc Irish were, it is true, very 
scarce in Southern cities, and by the end of our 
period they were growing numerous in the North. 
In the closing years of the Civil War, their superb 
fighting qualities largely offset the waning fire 
and dash of the Confederates. Neither did the 
South get any large share of the continental 
emigrants who came in such a rapidly growing 
stream in the fifties. But a moment's reflection 
is enough to dispel altogether the notion that, 
except by increasing the population, the wealth, 
and the voting power of the North, the Catholic 
Irish and the Italians, Swedes, Germans, and 
other comparatively new race elements in the 
North had any important effect in heightening 
the differences between the sections before the 
Civil War. The only really important differences 
that had to do with race were the greater homo- 
geneity of the English stock in New England, the 
greater mass of blacks in the South, and the 
larger proportion among the whites there both 
of such as had always been used to places of 
authority and of such as had always looked up 
to the authority of others. 

Somewhat more important, but still not of the 



10 THE LOWER SOUTH 

first importance, were the differences in religious 
traditions and in those political ideas which are 
closely related to men's religious beliefs and 
practices. During the period of the Puritan 
Revolution in old England, New England was 
mainly for the rebels and for Cromwell, while 
the Southern colonies leaned to the side of the 
king. The victories of Cromwell drove many 
of the gentry to Virginia, and the restoration of 
the Stuarts led to an increase in the Puritan 
population of New England. The English church 
never had much strength there until comparatively 
recent years, while in Virginia, up to the time of 
the great Methodist movement, its ascendency 
was uncontested. Before the Revolution, how- 
ever, Methodists and Baptists and Presbyterians 
were already numerous in the South, and since 
the colonies became States no one of the Southern 
States has had a majority of the Episcopalian 
faith and form of worship. Nevertheless, that 
long remained the leading denomination among 
the upper classes of Southern society, and through 
its vestry plan of church government and its 
organization by parishes it had a strong influence 
on the social and political life of the people — far 
stronger and more important than any loyalist 



THE LOWER SOUTH II 

sentiment or any aristocratic notions about gov- 
ernment which may have survived the Revolution. 
It contributed more to that divergence which 
gradually, in two centuries or thereabouts, from 
perfectly natural causes, and through no sudden 
or dramatic processes, made communities which 
began with the same political ideas unlike in 
their political no less than in their economic 
and social arrangements. 

The economic and industrial differences were 
manifest early in the colonial period. In Virginia 
and the CaroHnas, agriculture was always the main 
industry. The cereals were grown, but the chief 
and characteristic crops were tobacco in Virginia 
and North Carolina, rice and indigo, and to a less 
extent cotton, in South Carolina. The plantation 
system, instead of the small township groupings 
of New England, prevailed from the first, chiefly 
because good land was more plentiful and the 
chief crops could be grown more profitably on a 
large scale, but partly because, according to the 
prevalent system of church government, there 
was never any strong tendency in the people to 
gather about a meeting-house. In New England, 
each congregation was independent; the religious 
motive was, next to the primal physical needs, the 



12 THE LOWER SOUTH 

strongest of all ; and those of the people who lived 
by tilling the soil found that small holdings were 
most profitable. Negro labor not being adapted 
to the climate or the crops, and there being in 
New England no indentured white servants, large 
plantation establishments were never maintained. 
To gather in a comparatively thickly settled com- 
munity about a meeting-house, to meet all together 
now and then in order to discuss the affairs of 
the town, to make the town the unit of political 
and military organization and the refuge from 
the Indians, — all this was as natural for the 
Congregationalists of New England as an en- 
tirely dissimilar arrangement was natural for the 
Episcopalians of Virginia and the Carolinas. A 
coast indented everywhere with estuaries, a fertile 
soil, a mild climate, a labor system based first on 
indentured whites and then increasingly on Afri- 
can slaves, invited the Southern colonists to dis- 
perse and take up large holdings. Their church 
system, with its parish and its vestry, made no 
difficulty. 

The parish, comprising a reasonable number of 
plantations, became the unit of political organiza- 
tion. The vestry board, elective at first, but after 
1662 empowered, in Virginia, to fill its own vacan- 



THE LOWER SOUTH 1 3 

cies, did the thinking and the work of the parish, 
and there was no necessity for holding such as- 
sembHes as the town meeting, which would have 
been inconvenient for a people so scattered. On 
the other hand, the English county organization, 
which in New England never had any important 
part to play, was in Virginia a suitable device for 
such governmental work and such miUtary organi- 
zation as proved too big for the parish author- 
ities and too little for the colonial authorities. 
The English sheriff and the English lieutenant 
thus reappeared in the New World with their 
functions and their importance rather increased 
than diminished. Such offices fell naturally into 
the hands of the larger landowners, who were apt 
to be, though they were not always, members of 
the colonial gentry. The county courts grew in 
importance, and the practice of letting the judges 
make recommendations to the colonial governor 
concerning vacancies in their ranks ended in 
making the county bench almost as close a cor- 
poration as the parish vestry. The New England 
town easily grew into a city. In colonial Virginia, 
cities would not grow of themselves, and legisla- 
tion to make them grow was vain. On the South 
Carolina coast, where white men could not live 



14 THE LOWER SOUTH 

on their plantations during certain seasons, Charles- 
ton grew into some importance, and so did Savan- 
nah, in Georgia ; but plantations and small villages 
were in most quarters the only groupings of popu- 
lation. Even the court-houses at the county seats, 
though on court days they drew considerable gath- 
erings, stood sometimes almost alone. Country 
stores supplied the immediate demand for mer- 
chandise, but as a rule the plantations got their 
supplies straight from England, the ships in many 
cases unloading at each plantation wharf. Com- 
merce, seafaring, and manufactures, the sources 
of the wealth of New England, were practically 
unknown, save as conscious experiments. 

The plantation system, as developed in Virginia 
and applied chiefly to the culture of tobacco, was 
sufficiently profitable to maintain the colony up 
to the Revolution. It resulted in a society made 
up of several layers or ranks. The slaves were at 
the bottom. A considerable bulk of impecunious 
whites, ill educated, lacking industry and initiative, 
getting their living mainly from the poorer soils, 
was next in rank above the negroes. A compara- 
tively small body of white mechanics, tradesmen, 
and artisans held a doubtful place. Farmers 
with reasonable holdings and planters with great 



THE LOWER SOUTH 15 

holdings, the two classes not clearly separated 
but on the contrary almost merged into one class, 
were dominant politically and industrially. With 
them were associated the members of the learned 
professions. The lawyers, in particular, were im- 
portant niembers of society. It was a group of 
Virginian planters and lawyers who, after two 
hundred years of that life, proved by their work 
in Revolutionary times, and by their nobly rounded 
careers, that a slaveholding community, without 
commerce, without manufactures, without cities, 
without common schools, could yet produce men 
of the very highest wisdom and capacity for 
leadership. 

It is well known, however, that these men them- 
selves gravely questioned the soundness of the 
social organism from which they sprang. Jeffer- 
son bitterly lamented the fact of slavery, opposed 
the spread of it, placed the utmost emphasis on the 
value of New England's town meetings, and by 
destroying primogenitures aimed a blow directly 
at the plantation system. Washington's misgiv- 
ings were as gloomy. By the beginning of the 
nineteenth century, it was clear that Virginia and 
the other states of the upper South, if left to 
themselves, would almost certainly change their 



1 6 THE LOWER SOUTH 

industrial system, and changes in their social and 
political systems would naturally have followed. 
As late as the beginning of the fourth decade of 
the nineteenth century there still seemed a chance 
that Jefferson's counsel would be heeded. Sla- 
very in Virginia was a failure as compared with 
free labor in the North : the profits of tobacco- 
growing on the plantation plan did not begin to 
make amends for the lack of those countless 
material enterprises into which the people of 
commonwealths but little farther north, whose cli- 
mate and natural resources did not essentially 
differ from Virginia's, had pressed with eager 
energy. 

When Monroe ceased to be President, and the 
great Revolutionary group of Virginians passed 
into history, there seemed little reason to doubt 
that their power would fall into the hands of those 
Western representatives of the New England 
stock, already supreme in material achievement, 
who in our own last half of the century held 
so often the first places in the RepubUc. But 
the sceptre, though it passed from Virginia, was 
caught up by men of the Virginian strain. Not 
even the men of the West, though they put for- 
ward Clay, who to a Western energy and West- 



THE LOWER SOUTH 1/ 

ern ideas added the old Virginian charm of per- 
sonality, and though they soon learned to count 
upon the support of New England, which after 
the second Adams seldom had much direct leader- 
ship in national affairs — not even the growing 
West and the rich and prosperous East, combined 
or separate, could make headway against the new 
force which now appeared to battle for the institu- 
tions and the social organism, the material inter- 
ests and the political ideas, which Virginia, falling 
backward to lower and lower rank among the 
states, with all the prestige of her ancient leader- 
ship and all the glory of her great names, was herself 
almost ready to abandon. As the power of Vir- 
ginia declined, the power of the lower South rose. 
As the men of Virginia and the border states lost 
the first places in the national councils, the men of 
the Cotton states succeeded, not, indeed, to such 
preeminence as the Revolutionary Virginians had 
won, but to such a clear leadership of the South, and 
to such an ascendency in Congress and the courts, 
that for a quarter of a century they battled suc- 
cessfully with the men and the ideas of the East 
and West. 

The earlier history of the Southwest, bitter as 
were the controversies which were provoked by the 



1 8 THE LOWER SOUTH 

expansion of the Republic in that direction, and vo- 
luminous as the literature of those controversies has 
grown to be, still awaits the careful historical study 
which has been given to the winning of the North- 
west. Even the picturesque and romantic period of 
early exploration has suffered comparative neglect. 
The Northwest has profited to the full by Park- 
man's enthusiasm. The explorers and builders of 
French Canada, bootless as their work was, are 
invested with a romantic charm in his pages. All 
of us have followed his soldiers, his priests, his 
traders, in their heroic journeys over strange 
plains, among the great lakes, up and down the 
mysterious rivers, of the frozen land which they 
sought to turn into a new empire for France. The 
red men of our imagination are the red men of the 
North — the Hurons, the Chippewas, the Iroquois. 
But how many of us have ever followed that 
other and more promising effort to build up a 
French empire in the lower, warmer, more fertile 
region which the Spaniard had marched across 
and then left to a century and a half of utter 
darkness and mystery } The splendid and bloody 
pageant of De Soto's masterful expedition first 
revealed to savages more powerful and warlike 
than the Iroquois themselves the very existence of 



THE LOWER SOUTH 1 9 

civilization ; and his search for gold, vain as it was, 
first lifted for European eyes the veil which hid 
the most fruitful lands of the new world. When, 
after a century and a half, the veil was once more 
lifted, Spain, her Armada long since scattered and 
her imperial power declined to a second-rate im- 
portance, was falling backward in the Western 
race, and England and France were the chief com- 
petitors for the upper coasts of the gulf, the broad 
valleys of the Alabama and the Red River, and 
the still broader valley of the Mississippi. It was 
the young La Salle who stirred France to a sense 
of the greatness of the prize ; but how many of us 
who associate his name with Canada, the Lakes, 
and the narrow Mississippi of the Northwest re- 
member that he himself meant to crown his life- 
work with nation-building on the great Mississippi 
of the Southwest, or that his ardent spirit passed 
away still farther to the southwestward, on the 
coast of Texas .? To his companion, Tonti, a figure 
only less attractive than La Salle's own, — to 
Tonti of the iron hand, and to the heroic sons of 
the house of Le Moyne, — DTberville, Bienville, 
Sauvolle, — La Salle's task was left. These names 
are unfamiliar, yet the work these men did has a 
more permanent importance in our own history 



20 THE LOWER SOUTH 

than the work of the Canadian pioneers. A hun- 
dred and fifty years after De Soto, Spain still kept 
a weak hold on Florida, but it was these energetic 
Frenchmen who first planted civilization in the 
Southwest. Two hundred years ago they founded 
Mobile, and a quarter of a century later. New 
Orleans. They placated the warlike Creeks, made 
a firm alliance with the cunning Choctaws, and 
fought two bloody wars with the Chickasaws, 
whom De Soto had failed to conquer. At the 
mouth of the Mississippi they planted the civil 
law and the Catholic faith so firmly that to this day 
it is found convenient to keep on our supreme 
bench at least one jurist familiar with that legal 
system and preferably of that faith. Their traders 
and priests penetrated to the Red River country 
on the west, and their easternmost fort was near 
the present boundary of Georgia. Alternately 
waging petty wars and exchanging ornate courte- 
sies with the Spaniards of Florida, they flourished 
so under the unhealthy stimulus of John Law's 
South Sea enterprise that the fear of the French 
at Mobile was a motive additional to Oglethorpe's 
philanthropic designs in the founding of Georgia. 
But long before Georgia was founded unknown 
white men — men of whom nothing is known but 



THE LOWER SOUTH 21 

that they were Englishmen — had penetrated the 
wilderness far to the westward of the Appalachian 
Mountains, and struck bargains with the Indians, 
and undersold the French traders under the very 
walls of their forts. Iberville had encountered an 
English ship in the Mississippi in 1699 and turned it 
back by a stratagem ; some thirty years later, when 
his brother, Bienville, fought his fiercest battle 
with the Chickasaws, in what is now northern 
Mississippi, he saw an English flag flying over 
their town. An obscure warfare of trade and re- 
ligion was waged in that wild, flat region for more 
than half a century, until the long struggle for a 
continent ended on the Heights of Quebec. Then 
Mobile passed into the hands of the English, and 
New Orleans went to the Spaniards. 

Georgia and the Carolinas laid claims to great 
slices of land extending westward from their 
proper bounds to the Mississippi, and farther 
south were the once Spanish, now English, 
provinces of East Florida and West Florida, 
which were loyaUst during the Revolution, and 
so find no place in the histories of that second 
struggle for the continent. West Florida, ex- 
tending from New Orleans eastward beyond 
Mobile, was, however, invaded and conquered 



22 THE LOWER SOUTH 

during the war by Spaniards from Mexico, and 
both the Floridas came once again into the hands 
of Spain under the treaty of peace in 1783. Then 
came boundary controversies with Spain, and 
Spanish intrigues looking to the separation of 
the Southwest from the Union. By the end of 
the century the boundary between the Span- 
ish Floridas and the United States had been 
fixed, the line running east and west from the 
Mississippi River to the Georgia line ; and early in 
the nineteenth century Georgia, following the lead 
of the Carolinas, gave up her claim to the region 
north of the Floridas. Then Louisiana was bought, 
and it became only a question of time when the 
Spaniards would have to go. For a moment, Aaron 
Burr's mysterious enterprise seemed once more 
to threaten a separation of the Southwest from 
the Union. But our final struggle for the most 
disputed region in North America was with the 
British, who in the War of 1812 sent their strong- 
est expedition to that quarter; with the Spaniards, 
who were really passive allies of England ; and 
with the first claimants of all, the Indians. It 
was the men of the Southwest themselves who 
won the fight for the United States. Led by 
Andrew Jackson, they crushed the Creeks in the 



THE LOWER SOUTH 23 

most obstinate of all our Indian wars, battered 
down the forts of Pensacola, defended Mobile, 
which General Wilkinson had already occupied, 
and at New Orleans won the single great land 
victory of the war. A few years later, Florida 
was again invaded in pursuit of the Seminoles, 
and Spain's protests ended with the treaty which 
gave us the whole Gulf coast from Key West to 
the Sabine. 

But the lands thus won forever to English 
speech and English law were still for the most 
part a wilderness when the last century began. 
The Spaniards and the French had explored them 
for gold and precious stones, and failing in that 
quest had long confined themselves to trade with 
the Indians. They only gradually learned that 
the true value of the country was in its fertile 
soil, and they never gave much thought to its 
richest product. The English, coming later in 
small numbers to West Florida, and Ameri- 
cans, climbing over or journeying around the 
mountains, passed by the beds of coal and iron 
in the foothills of the Appalachian system and 
sought the lower agricultural lands. But the 
difficulty of separating the fibre from the seeds 
made the culture of cotton on a large scale 



24 THE LOWER SOUTH 

unprofitable, and the rice of South Carolina, the 
sugar-cane of Louisiana, bade fair to prove the 
main staples of the lower South until, in 1793, 
Eli Whitney, a visitor at the plantation home of 
General Nathaniel Greene, near Savannah, shut 
himself up in a garret and set his Yankee brain 
to work on a machine that grew into the cotton 
gin. 

In 1808, the foreign slave trade was forbidden. 
Ten years later, while the Virginians, discour- 
aged about agriculture and discontent with 
slavery, were still pondering the words of Jef- 
ferson, thousands of English-speaking men and 
women were sweeping over and around the 
Appalachian wall, lighting up the forests, as a 
contemporary declares, with twinkling camp-fires, 
keeping pace with the march of free labor 
across the continent to the northward, and bent 
on growing cotton with slave labor on the lands 
which Andrew Jackson had wrested from the 
Creeks and defended against the British and 
the Spaniards. Another stream moved down the 
Mississippi Valley from Kentucky, Tennessee, 
and other states to the northward. State after 
state was erected to pair off with the new 
states of the Northwest. Pushing in front of it 



THE LOWER SOUTH 2$ 

a fringe of moccasined pioneers, the tide passed 
on to the westward, across the Mississippi, across 
the Red River of the West, across the Sabine, 
until the Englishman and the Spaniard were 
face to face in the desert and the old affair of 
the Armada, the ancient quarrel of the Spanish 
Main and the Dutch lowlands, was renewed on 
the plains of Texas. 

In the imperial domain thus slowly acquired 
and swiftly occupied were many material resources, 
many avenues to wealth that should have tempted 
enterprise. There were forests, rich deposits of 
iron and other minerals, a soil adapted to 
various crops, navigable streams for internal 
commerce, a reasonable number of ports for 
foreign commerce. Across the whole region, 
however, there stretched, from east to west, a 
band of dark, calcareous earth adapted as no 
other inland soil in the world is to the culture 
of cotton. This " Black Belt," varying in width 
from a score or more to a hundred or more 
of miles, and various fertile valleys north and 
south of it, at once attracted the richer and 
more energetic of the immigrants. The sandier 
and less fertile lowlands fell for the most part to 
comparatively small farmers, though their holdings 



26 THE LOWER SOUTH 

would never be called small in New England, for 
each of them cultivated a dozen times as much 
land as one finds in the farms of Rhode Island and 
Connecticut. Such small farmers should never be 
confounded with the so-called " poor whites," who 
drifted into the pine barrens of the coast region or 
built their rude cabins among the hills to the 
northward. The great mass of the slaves belonged 
to the men who took the Black Belt and the rich 
valleys for their portion. The various classes of 
Virginian and Carolinian society all found their 
places in the new commonwealths, bringing with 
them their political institutions, their religious and 
social usages, their habits of thought and speech 
and action. But there was a certain process of 
selection about their coming, and then a sure effect 
of environment and growth, which somewhat dif- 
ferentiated the new society from the society which 
had produced Washington and Jefferson. As a rule, 
the emigrants were the men of the older seaboard 
Southern states who were the readiest to better their 
fortunes by changing their homes. As some one 
has said of the English who came to America before 
the Revolution, they were the men who had the 
most "get up and get" about them. The same 
process of selection continued as from Alabama 



THE LOWER SOUTH 2/ 

and Mississippi the more adventurous pressed on 
to Louisiana and Arkansas and Texas. 

The form which Virginian society took in the 
lower South, the term comprehending South Caro- 
lina and Georgia on the east, and Louisiana and 
Arkansas and eastern Texas on the west, parts of 
Tennessee on the north, and also Florida, has been 
examined mainly from the outside, and usually 
under the guidance of general economic and moral 
theories. In the writings of Northern historians 
and political scientists, the moral weaknesses of 
slavery and the plantation system have been most 
emphasized. Mr. Cairnes, a very able economist 
of the school of John Stuart Mill, has surrounded 
the economic man with that environment and sub- 
jected him to such influences as could be mathe- 
matically reasoned out of the institutions which 
prevailed there, and particularly the institution of 
slavery. Mr. Frederick Law Olmsted, in his 
several volumes of travels, has supplied us with a 
mass of interesting, accurate, and intelligent ob- 
servations. Foreign travellers have added much 
to our store. Yet it is quite possible that Mr. 
Cairnes' s close reasoning, Mr. Olmsted's intel- 
ligent observation, and all similar attempts from 
outside, or at least from outsiders, have failed to 



28 THE LOWER SOUTH 

paint for us the true form and hue of that vanished 
life. We know that similar attempts of Europeans 
to exhibit the true form and hue of our entire 
American civilization by putting together many 
minute observations, or by reasoning from a few 
broad truths, have seldom succeeded. We admit 
the facts, perhaps, and we admire the reasoning, 
but we do not recognize the picture. A perfectly 
faithful picture of the civilization of the lower 
South would show at work there the forces and 
tendencies which Mr. Cairnes discussed, but it 
would show others also. It would belie none of 
Mr. Olmsted's observations, but it would correlate 
them with other facts, not, perhaps, less important, 
and throw upon them a light not quite so pitiless 
and distorting. It would, at least, enable us to 
recognize those still existing parts and members 
of the structure which time and war have indeed 
changed and broken, but not yet altogether de- 
stroyed. Surely, a true picture of Southern life 
half a century ago should not seem altogether 
strange to men and women, still living, who were 
once a part of it. 

Put in its briefest and barest form, the outside 
view of that society is somewhat like this : — 

The labor of slaves in the culture of cotton, rice, 



THE LOWER SOUTH 29 

and sugar-cane was profitable when employed on a 
large scale, and on rich lands, which, however, it 
soon exhausted, and so created a constant demand 
for fresh lands. Slave labor, however, was unavail- 
able for manufactures, and far less profitable than 
free labor in the growing of small crops, because a 
slave has no incentive to thrift, care, honesty, and 
intelligence. It left no place for free labor of 
any manual sort, because it made such labor dis- 
graceful. It tended to put wealth and power of 
all sorts into the hands of a small class, because 
small holdings were less profitable than large, and 
thus brought about the rule of an oligarchy of 
slaveholders, reducing the great mass of the 
whites ,to a state of indigence, ignorance, and 
listlessness. Mr. Cairnes describes them as "an 
idle and lawless rabble who live dispersed over 
vast plains in a condition little removed from 
absolute barbarism." This rabble, he says, num- 
bered about five millions. The oligarchy of great 
planters, supreme at home, and wielding in national 
politics the power freely rendered up to them by 
millions of Southern poor whites and also the 
power they got through the Constitutional arrange- 
ment which gave them representation in Congress 
for three-fifths of their slaves, managed, by alliances 



30 THE LOWER SOUTH 

with certain weak elements in Northern society, 
to dominate the government at Washington. They 
used their power cruelly at home, for contact with 
slaves bred contempt for the weak, and unscrupu- 
lously at Washington, aiming always to protect 
themselves in their peculiar rights of property and 
to secure, by breaking old agreements concerning 
territory already acquired, and by ruthless con- 
quests of other territory, those fresh lands which 
slavery and the plantation system constantly 
demanded. 

Every one of these forces was at work, every 
one of these tendencies was manifest, in the lower 
South. And yet, after some years of patient 
inquiry into the written and printed records of 
the civilization thus outlined, after following the 
history, from year to year, of a particular Southern 
state, after much free and intimate acquaintance 
with men and women of the old regime, after 
long study of the remnants of that already 
ancient and outworn vesture of decay still hang- 
ing in shreds and patches about the revivified 
South of to-day, I cannot recognize the picture 
as a true Hkeness of that which was. 

For it was no economic man, no mere creature 
of desires and interests and inevitable mental 



THE LOWER SOUTH 3 1 

processes, on whom these forces played, in whom 
these tendencies were at work. It was a Vir- 
ginian but a few decades removed from Wash- 
ington and Yorktown, from Jefferson and the 
Declaration, from Madison and the Constitution, 
from Mason and the Bill of Rights. It was 
a Carolinian but one or two generations from 
Marion and Routledge and the two Pinckneys. 
It was an Englishman with centuries of the tra- 
dition of ordered liberty and slow progress in 
his inmost thought, and in his veins the blood 
which the Normans spilled for Duke William 
when he brought to England the rudimentary 
forms of jury justice and the blood which the 
Saxon- spilled for King Harold when he fought 
with Duke WiUiam for England's right to name 
her own rulers. It was a Scotch-Irishman whose 
ancestors had lived through the siege of 'Derry 
and given to the northern parts of Ireland the 
prosperity so little shared by its southern parts. 
It was a French Huguenot of the strain of them 
that followed Henry of Navarre to the throne 
and Coligny to the block. And so, too, of the 
slave from whose abasement it is so easy to infer 
the degeneracy of the master and the degrada- 
tion of all who were neither masters nor slaves. 



32 THE LOWER SOUTH 

He was no mere black impersonation of those 
qualities alone which servitude implies. He was 
an individual with his individual peculiarities and 
of a race with marked characteristics of its own. 
Naturally without the progressive impulses of 
his master, he was at once less sensitive than 
his master would have been to the horrors and 
the shame of servitude, and capable, as his mas- 
ter would never have been, of fealty and affection 
to the very hand that chained him. He could 
find some incentive to industry in the difference 
between the lot he might have if he were a 
house servant and the lot he would have as a 
field hand. Slavery was, in the well-known 
phrase of Clay, " a curse to the master and a 
wrong to the slave." But it was not an unmiti- 
gated wrong to the slave ; and two centuries of 
it in Virginia and half a century of it in the 
Black Belt were not enough to destroy the moral 
fibre of the master, to cheat him of his racial 
birthright, or to ban him from the portals of 
modern civilization. 

I wish to sketch, as simply as I can, in outline, 
but faithfully, the form which slavery and the 
plantation system took during their new lease of 
life after the occupation of the lower South, 



THE LOWER SOUTH 33 

in the particular Southern commonwealth with 
whose history I am most familiar. As it happens, 
it is perhaps the best of the Cotton states to use 
for an example, by reason of its central geographi- 
cal position and the typicalness of its population 
and its civilization. 

In 1850, when Alabama had been thirty years 
a state, her population was about three-quarters 
of a million, and the proportion of slaves to free- 
men was about three to four. The total included 
a small percentage of Catholic French, partly 
made up of the descendants of the French who 
settled Mobile, partly of more recent colonists, 
veterans of the Napoleonic wars, who had first 
built up a community of their own in a county 
which they named for the battle of Marengo 
and then scattered and intermarried with people 
of English descent. This French element, more 
interesting than important, and a similarly un- 
important Spanish element, both confined for the 
most part to points near the Gulf coast, were the 
only race elements in the Cotton states that were 
not found in Virginia and the Carolinas. 

Like Virginia, Alabama was in 1850 a dis- 
tinctly agricultural community. What industrial 
difference there was did not lie in any greater 



34 THE LOWER SOUTH 

diversification of industries but in the somewhat 
changed character of the main industry as it was 
practised in the younger commonwealth. The 
growing of cotton gave to slave labor its best 
opportunity : the cotton planter profited most by 
that one quality in which, according to Mr. 
Cairnes, slave labor excels — its capacity for 
organization and combination. As a rule, the 
large slave owners of Alabama were either cotton 
planters or members of the learned professions, 
who lived in the towns, and the great mass of 
the slaves belonged to a comparatively small 
number of men. As a matter of fact, less than 
thirty thousand persons, that is to say, less 
than seven per cent of the white population of 
Alabama, owned the three hundred and thirty- 
five thousand slaves in the state. The average 
holding of slaves was therefore between eleven 
and twelve. Three-fourths of all the slaves were 
owned by less than ten thousand men. 

The land holdings of these men were in pro- 
portion to their holdings of slaves. Their planta- 
tions frequently included thousands of acres, and 
from the big plantations came the bulk of the 
cotton crop. Its average annual value was about 
20 millions of dollars. There were only twelve 



THE LOWER SOUTH 35 

small cotton factories in the state, so that 
practically all of the product was sent to New 
England or exported to Europe. The total annual 
exports of the state, cotton, of course, being the 
chief, were 10 J millions; the imports, less than 
one million. Alabama therefore contributed, as 
did all the Cotton states, far more than her share 
to the country's favorable balance of trade ; and 
it should be added that her product contributed 
materially to the prosperity of other sections. 
Yancey, the Alabamian orator, visiting New Eng- 
land and observing the stony and unfruitful soil, 
was at a loss to explain the wealth of the East 
until he' saw cotton bales on the wharves at Boston 
and visited the cotton mills of neighboring cities. 
No doubt, he exaggerated the importance of what 
he saw ; but the East certainly profited by the 
Southern market. The new Northwestern states 
were even more deeply indebted to the lower 
South than the East was; their prosperity may 
in fact be dated from the development of a re- 
gion which did not raise its own bread and meat, 
and which could be reached by rivers that had 
their sources near the Great Lakes and their 
mouths on the Gulf. The Cotton states first 
offered to the West, before the building of east 



36 THE LOWER SOUTH 

and west railroads, a market for those cereal 
crops which now make the upper Mississippi 
Valley the granary of the world. 

For even those Alabama farmers who owned 
but one or two slaves, or no slaves at all, were 
nevertheless devoted in their loyalty to King Cot- 
ton. They seldom grew more corn and potatoes, 
or any other of the many food products for which 
their land was fit, or bred more cattle and swine, 
than they required for their own use ; frequently, 
they did not raise enough food for their own use. 
The supreme attractiveness of cotton was due 
to the readiness with which it could be turned 
into money, the simplicity of the methods by 
which it was grown, and the comparative ease 
with which it could be marketed, even in a coun- 
try of bad roads, which had as yet less than two 
hundred miles of railroads. The steamboats, ply- 
ing all the navigable rivers, enlivening the forests 
with their steam calliopes, and brightening the low- 
lands at night with their brilliant cabin lights, were 
the chief representatives of modern methods of 
transportation. Cotton was hauled from the plan- 
tation to the nearest river bluff, the bales went shd- 
ing down an incHne to the waiting steamboat, and 
so passed on to Mobile, New Orleans, Boston, 



THE LOWER SOUTH 37 

Liverpool. The planter perhaps followed his 
crop as far as Mobile or New Orleans, made 
a settlement with his agent, enjoyed his annual 
outing, and returned with his supplies for another 
year, not neglecting a proper provision for the 
fortnight's feasting and jollity at the approaching 
Christmastide. 

That was the industrial life of the farmers and 
planters, who with their dependents and slaves 
made up more than half the entire population 
of the state. It differed from the industrial life 
of the same classes in Virginia chiefly in the con- 
centraticxn of land and slaves in fewer hands, 
in the greater immediate profitableness of agri- 
culture, and in the greater rapidity with which 
lands were exhausted. Manufactures, banking, 
commerce, and all other industries to which the 
term " business " is ordinarily applied, can scarcely 
have supported more than seventy-five thousand 
or one hundred thousand white persons, employ- 
ing perhaps as many negro slaves. As in Vir- 
ginia, there were no great cities ; in fact. Mobile 
alone had any good claim to be called a city. 
But small towns sprang up somewhat rapidly, 
partly because the separate plantations could not 
be reached by water so easily as in Virginia, partly 



38 THE LOWER SOUTH 

because the parish system of church government 
had no effect on the grouping of the population, 
and partly, perhaps, because the greater loneliness 
of plantation Hfe drew people together. Of the 
parish, in fact, one hears almost nothing in the 
lower South, except in Louisiana; and the parishes 
there, of a different origin, and bearing French 
names, corresponded to the counties, not the 
parishes, of Virginia. 

The Southern country town, eclipsed by the 
more picturesque plantation, has been somewhat 
neglected in literature ; yet it also had its charm 
and its importance. It could not do the work of 
a city ; it was quite unHke a New England village ; 
it was not much like a Western town. Its leading 
citizens were planters, each of whom had at least 
one plantation, and not rarely several, in the 
county, half a dozen lawyers and politicians, the 
ministers of several churches, one or two physi- 
cians, and perhaps the teaching staff of a college 
or seminary. Two or three general stores, a livery 
stable, a bank, and the county court-house fronted 
on the principal square or were ranged along the 
main thoroughfare. There might be a small grog- 
shop in some inconspicuous place ; but there was 
a strong feeling in many such small communities 



THE LOWER SOUTH 39 

in favor of prohibition on the local option plan. 
The houses of the planters and professional men, 
usually in the outskirts of the town, were spacious, 
as a rule, and had frequently some claim to ele- 
gance. On Saturdays, the stores were crowded 
with small farmers and negroes from the surround- 
ing country, and during court week and in Christ- 
mas time one might see perhaps a thousand 
people and many vehicles. Ordinarily, and par- 
ticularly in summer time, the whole aspect of such 
a community was one of almost dreamy idleness. 
There^ remains one other sort of industrial life ; 
but the word " industrial " is too much like industri- 
ous to be safely applied to it. The people of the 
hills and the sand barrens, the true ** poor whites," 
need no lengthy description. The class still 
exists, practically unchanged, for these people 
had no part in slavery and the plantation system, 
and it is hard to find any betterment of their 
state from the overthrow of slavery. Many of 
them, living in the mountainous regions, content 
to win a bare subsistence from the unfruitful 
surface of the hills which held in their bowels 
the immense mineral wealth of the state, never 
saw a negro from year to year, and never came 
in contact with the planters of the Black Belt and 



40 THE LOWER SOUTH 

the river valleys until they, stripped of their 
wealth and slaves by the war, turned from their 
exhausted fields to the hills they had so long 
neglected, and disturbed, with their railroads and 
their furnaces, the remote, unthrifty, unambitious, 
inscrutable people of the squalid cabin and the 
long rifle and the chin beard and the hidden distil- 
lery and the oddly Elizabethan speech, who for 
three hundred years have not even noted the 
growth of America or the progress of the world. 
In the industrial life, the intellectual life, the 
political life, and the actively religious life of the 
South, these people had no part under slavery, 
and they have none under freedom. If it was 
they whom Mr. Cairnes meant when he spoke of 
an "idle and lawless rabble," — and I can find 
nowhere else Alabama's share of the five millions 
of such people whom he credits to the whole 
South, — it is difficult to accept his theory that 
slavery alone produced them^ since under freedom 
they have not changed or disappeared. 

Among the white people of Alabama who did 
play a part in its history there was an intense 
religious life, a limited, but not entirely arrested, 
intellectual development, and a political activity 
far more notable than any to be found under the 



THE LOWER SOUTH 4I 

peculiar conditions, resulting from the Civil Vvar 
and from Reconstruction, which now prevail. 

The various Protestant denominations, particu- 
larly the Baptists and Methodists, were strong 
everywhere, the main strength of the Episcopa- 
lians being among the richer planters and their 
associates. There were nearly fifteen hundred 
houses of worship ; the traveller was apt to find 
one wherever two highways crossed. Here the 
people gathered every Sunday and listened, with 
reverence and implicit faith, to a long sermon, 
usually jrhetorical in its style and orthodox in its 
teaching. Unitarianism, Universalism, and simi- 
lar religious movements of a progressive or revo- 
lutionary tendency never spread into the South, 
where the churches always exercised a distinctly 
conservative influence on thought in general. 
After the service at a country meeting-house, 
there was a half hour of gossip about crops, the 
weather, and poHtics. Then the people went 
home to their midday dinner : the wealthy in fine 
carriages, others in wagons or on horses and 
mules. Camp meetings were an early and natural 
device among so scattered a people. They were 
sometimes immense gatherings, arousing the ut- 
most fervor. 



42 THE LOWER SOUTH 

Schools did not multiply like churches. There 
was no organized public school system until the 
end of the fifties. But about a thousand public 
schools, maintained chiefly from gifts of the gen- 
eral government, offered rudimentary instruction 
to less than thirty thousand children. There 
were, however, some really good academies at- 
tended by the children of the comparatively well- 
to-do, and there were several colleges which 
compared quite favorably with similar institutions 
in the West, and even with the smaller colleges 
of the older eastern communities. A surpris- 
ing progress had been made in the development 
of girls' colleges. The percentage of illiterates 
was large, but this was chiefly due to the people 
of the hills and the pine barrens. Tutors were 
commonly employed on the great plantations, 
and the sons of such households were frequently 
sent to Eastern colleges and trained for learned 
professions. 

There were many men and women who cared 
about books, and some private libraries well stocked 
with Greek and Latin and English classics; but 
there was little interest in contemporary litera- 
ture, and no important literary activity. Only one 
person confessed to the census taker in 1850 that 



THE LOWER SOUTH 43 

authorship was his (or perhaps her) occupation, 
though four or five Alabamians wrote books with 
some skill in composition and won some favor 
with the public. Practically all the planter's 
books, and everything else he read except his 
weekly political and religious newspapers, came, 
like his tools and furniture, from the North, or 
from England, or, if he lived near New Orleans, 
from France. Even his children's school books 
came, along with their tutor or governess, from 
New England or old England. Sargent S. Pren- 
tiss and 'William H. Seward are examples of New 
England tutors ; Philip Henry Gosse, the natural- 
ist, brother to Edmund Gosse, the man of letters, 
was an Enghsh tutor in the household of an 
Alabamian planter. 

The best intellect of the state went sometimes 
into the ministry or into medicine, but oftener into 
the law, and through the law into politics, though 
the proportion of highly endowed young men who 
sought careers in the small army and navy of 
those days was probably larger than in the East 
or the West, where young men of like endow- 
ments and temper of mind were attracted by great 
business enterprises. As to the bar, one would 
think that the want of great cities and of great 



44 THE LOWER SOUTH 

industrial enterprises might have put lawyers at 
a disadvantage as compared with their brethren of 
the North. But whether able men turned to the 
law because there were few other openings, or 
because, among a people who cared more for ora- 
tory than for any other art, the law was the surest 
avenue to distinction, to the law they did turn 
most frequently. One result was that in Alabama 
the courts, notwithstanding it became the custom 
to elect judges instead of appointing them, early 
attained and long maintained a high standard of 
excellence. The decisions of the Supreme Court 
took high rank with lawyers and law writers 
everywhere. 

Internally, the state was in the main well 
governed, according to the Jeffersonian idea of 
government. There was no such predominance 
of the great planter class as one might expect. 
Governors and legislators were chosen from 
various social ranks; many prominent men were 
distinctly of the self-made type. The state had 
its period of folly over banks and paper money, 
but the opposition to the experiment was ably 
led, and when the costly lesson had been 
learned the people and their representatives paid 
for their folly manfully, frowning down the 



THE LOWER SOUTH 45 

least suggestion of repudiation, and even over- 
throwing the party in power to get a sound 
governor elected. The part which the men of 
Alabama and the other Cotton states played in 
Federal politics, and the long fight they made for 
national ascendency, is another matter, and our 
proper subject. 

But before we turn to the militant aspect of 
that civilization, I wish to say one word more of 
its inner quality. Before we take our view of the 
men of the lower South framing laws in Congress, 
carrying out their policies in the Cabinet and 
the White House, or making ready for battle- 
fields, let us glance at them once more in their 
homes, planting their fields, enjoying their chief 
diversions of riding and hunting, celebrating 
their feasts, solemnizing their marriages, burying 
their dead. Their home life was, in fact, the 
most precious part of their heritage from their 
Virginian and Carolinian and English ancestors. 
The rapid acquirement of wealth by growing 
cotton did certainly for a time diminish in the 
Cotton states the association of wealth with 
good birth which had prevailed in the seaboard 
states ; but the somewhat patriarchal form which 
plantation life always took counteracted any 



46 THE LOWER SOUTH 

tendency to develop a recognizable nouveaux 
riches class. The immense size of the planta- 
tions made it impossible for masters to main- 
tain with all their slaves that kindly relation 
of protector and protected, of strong and weak, 
which was the Virginian tradition. But such a 
kindly tradition was certainly the rule in planta- 
tion households, whatever may have been the 
rule or practice among overseers and field 
hands. 

As we have seen, the great majority of white 
men owned either no slaves at all, or but one 
or two. Yet it is true that the plantation was the 
typical community of the lower South, its laws 
and usages quite as dominant socially as its 
economic influence was dominant politically ; and 
the plantation of the lower South, Hke the plan- 
tation of Virginia, unfruitful as it was in art 
and literature and philanthropy, was yet the 
source of more cordiality and kindliness in all 
the ordinary relations of men and women, of 
more generous impulses, of a more constant 
protest against commercialism, of more distinc- 
tion of manner and charm of personality, than 
any other way of life practised by Americans be- 
fore the Civil War. Men crowded together in new 



THE LOWER SOUTH 47 

cities, seeking chiefly money, in no wise rooted 
to the soil, thrown into no permanent relations 
of superior and inferior, could not be expected 
to develop those intangible, indefinable social 
qualities which made Southerners of the planter 
class intelligible and companionable to Enghsh 
country gentlemen, not because of their birth, 
but because of their habits of Hfe and thought 
and speech. One who seeks to understand why, 
in 1 86 1, the English upper classes favored the 
South, will not reach the end of his list of 
causes until he compares such a man as Thomas 
Dabney, of Mississippi, — his chevalier look, his 
leisurely, easy bearing, his simple and yet grace- 
ful courtesy, and his speech, freed of all jarring 
consonant sounds, — with one of those straight- 
forward, businessHke, equally masterful but less 
gracious men of the West, who, without practis- 
ing a bow or sparing a consonant, came forward to 
tell England and the world that the most pictu- 
resque of American institutions was not American 
at all. It is a superficial historical philosophy 
which dilates on the economic and institutional dif- 
ferences between the two sections, and ignores 
such smaller divergences as appeared in the man- 
ners and speech of individuals. 



48 THE LOWER SOUTH 

The harshness of the outward, the militant 
aspect of the civiUzation of the lower South, 
the gentleness and charm of the inner side of 
plantation life, make a contrast hard for a 
stranger to understand. But to one who, in the 
gloomy years of the slow upbuilding of that 
overthrown and prostrate civilization, has sought 
to see it as it was before it fell, — to one who 
has studied men's faces which, however they 
hardened after laughter, were yet always quick 
to lighten up with kindliness and merriment, 
and women's faces which, however marked with 
the touch of sorrow and humiUation and an 
unfamiliar poverty, were yet sealed with a true 
seal of dignity and grace, — to such a stu- 
dent of the old Southern life, the inner side of 
it is more attractive than the outer. The one 
is like the midday look of that fruitful but too 
heated land ; the other brings to mind its 
evening aspect. Those midday heats are often 
hard to bear. The sun's progress through the 
heavens is the hard march of a ruthless con- 
queror. The rank vegetation fairly chokes the 
earth. Insects buzz and sting and irritate. Ser- 
pents writhe to the surface of miasmous streams. 
Beasts palpitate and grow restless. Men brood, 



THE LOWER SOUTH 49 

and weary of the loneliness, and long for excite- 
ment, for fierce deeds, battles, conquests. But with 
the sudden dropping of the sun in the West a swift 
change comes over the earth and beasts and 
men. There is the stillness of the wide, level 
fields, snowlike with cotton; the softer, night- 
time noises of the woods and swamps; the splen- 
dor of the Southern stars ; the tinkling of banjos 
and the twinkling of Ughts in the negro quar- 
ters; the white dresses of women and children, 
and the exquisite, slow tones of human voices 
on the verandas of the great house. The ran- 
cor of the midday passes — eclipsed, over- 
come, atoned for, by the charmed sweetness of 
that dying hour. 



THE ASCENDENCY OF THE LOWER SOUTH IN 
THE UNION 

In order to understand the nature and the mag- 
nitude of the effect which the rise of the Cotton 
states had upon the poHtical history of the whole 
country, it is necessary to recall the general politi- 
cal situation when senators and representatives 
from the lower South first took their seats in 
Congress ; to realize how definite and single 
their controlling motive in public life was; to 
analyze the sources of the power they wielded; 
and to do justice to the ability and zeal, how- 
ever misguided it may have been, of the men 
themselves. 

Taking the close of Monroe's second admin- 
istration in 1824 as our point of departure, we 
find it a time when any strong and definite 
material interest, adequately represented at Wash- 
ington, was sure to have a powerful influence 
on the course of affairs. With the passage of 
the great men of the revolutionary school there 
passed also, for a time at least, the great ques- 

50 



THE LOWER SOUTH 5 1 

tions they had dealt with. The second war with 
Great Britain had divorced us, far more con- 
clusively than the first, from those European 
complications against which Washington and 
Jefferson had warned their countrymen. Our 
Constitution had been operating long enough 
and well enough to inspire a general confidence 
in its soundness and to discourage any attempt 
to alter its essential features. The relations 
between the different departments of the gov- 
ernment had been fixed with reasonable finality. 
Hamilton had done his work so well that the 
finances no longer required any heroic treatment 
or provoked any bitter controversies. The Feder- 
alist party, having served the purpose of its 
founding, and exhausted its energy in the work of 
construction, and having shown its inability to 
adapt itself to the new conditions which its own 
policies had brought about, had practically disap- 
peared. There was little discussion of principles, 
and as yet no clear alignment on poHcies and 
interests. It is misleading to say, as so many 
historians do say, that only one party existed, 
but party lines had been obscured. Ceasing to 
divide on the old questions, men did not know 
how they were going to divide on questions 



52 THE LOWER SOUTH 

which did not yet present themselves clearly. 
So they broke into factions, grouping about 
leaders instead of fighting for causes. 

The new questions were not yet clearly for- 
mulated because, as the country turned from a 
foreign war to consider its own internal life and 
growth, no great conflict of material interests 
was yet clearly manifest. New England, though 
first the embargo and then the war had sadly 
diminished that seafaring industry of hers which 
Burke praised so, was not yet sure that her 
industrial future was to be mainly an affair of 
mills and shops. Kentucky and the middle 
West, and even Virginia and the seaboard 
Southern states, still entertained hopes of a 
various industrial development, based on their 
variety of material resources. It was in Ken- 
tucky and the middle West that the policy of pro- 
tection and internal improvements, the ** American 
system," had had its birth, and Henry Clay was 
its champion. By the side of Clay there had stood 
the young Calhoun, of South Carolina, those fierce 
eyes of his aglow with a true national spirit, while 
the young Webster had opposed them both, ex- 
posing the fallacies and combating the whole 
theory of protection with the most massive elo- 



THE LOWER SOUTH 53 

quence ever arrayed against it. If there was 
one quarter of the Union where the new na- 
tional feeUng was weak, it was New England, 
her old Federalist leaders long excluded from 
power, her industry not yet diverted from its 
ancient channels, her best minds not yet quick- 
ened by the Unitarian revolt into those succes- 
sive experiments of a larger and larger intellectual 
freedom which began with the leadership of 
Channing and culminated in the leadership of 
Garrison.- Virginia was already in that hesitat- 
ing, divided state, torn by the conflict between 
her traditions of spacious patriotism and her 
institutional kinship with the lower South, which, 
even more than the decline of her public men, 
debarred her from leadership for forty years. 
If there was one quarter of the Union where 
the new national feeling was strongest, it was 
the middle West, where Clay led, and the South- 
west, where Andrew Jackson, shrewdly coached, 
was turning his military glory into political 
power. South Carolina was beginning to bring 
to bear upon Calhoun that detaining urgency 
from the rear which first checked him in his 
promising career as a national statesman, and 
set him thinking about the nature of the gov- 



54 THE LOWER SOUTH 

ernment, and finally turned him into the very 
type and exemplar of fidelity to a special in- 
terest. 

How strong that interest was first appeared in 
the debates over the admission of Missouri. 
Northern men were not at that time moved by any 
such aggressive antislavery impulse as appeared a 
decade or more later. They were acting just as 
Jefferson acted in regard to the Northwest terri- 
tory, and in accordance with his views. What 
startled the country now, and startled the aged 
Jefferson himself, was the fierceness of the opposi- 
tion to his own programme of limiting slavery to 
the states where it already existed : the Southern 
congressmen and senators were almost solidly in 
favor of admitting Missouri as a slave state. How- 
ever, with the adoption of Clay's compromise, the 
rancor quickly subsided. There was for a time 
general acquiescence in the decision that a geo- 
graphical line should divide the regions in which 
slavery existed and into which it might spread 
from the regions into which only free labor should 
be admitted. We may, therefore, take the com- 
promise as a sort of law of war, fixing the terms on 
which all sectional contests which might arise in 
the ordinary course of legislation should be fought 



THE LOWER SOUTH 55 

out. For a clear illustration of the long conflict of 
interests which now began, and a setting forth 
of the interest which the men of the Cotton 
states particularly represented, it is better for us 
to turn to the tariff controversy from 1828 to 
1833. It was over such questions as the tariff 
and finance and foreign affairs, — ordinary sub- 
jects of legislation, — and not over the admission 
of new states, that the fight was made during 
the years immediately following the rise of the 
lower South. 

Clay was still the champion of the American 
system, but Calhoun was now against him, and 
Webster's great figure was by his side. Webster 
was unquestionably influenced by the material in- 
terests of his section, now pursuing chiefly manu- 
factures and domestic commerce ; and Calhoun by 
the material interests of his, now committed to 
agriculture and to an exchange of one or two 
staples, preferably with Europe, for all other prod- 
ucts of industry. That these two eminent men 
and their associates and followers were so influ- 
enced cannot be accounted a positive reproach, for 
the great majority of public men have always stood 
mainly for material interests. In our national 
Congress to-day the representatives of each sec- 



56 THE LOWER SOUTH 

tion and each corner of the country feel that it is 
their first concern to protect and advance its ma- 
terial interests. For this they are ordinarily sent to 
Washington and kept there. Let any one of them 
neglect this, and he will ordinarily lose his seat. 
Some are no doubt wise enough to see that the 
highest interests of every section are bound up in 
the welfare of the whole, and all but a very few 
have theories and sympathies of their own which 
they express in their votes and speeches, so far as 
they can express them without antagonizing the 
interests they represent. Occasionally, too, a 
statesman altogether devoted to the national honor 
and integrity, or to a single principle, keeps his 
place by virtue of exceptional ability and popu- 
larity. But such men are not common. Of that 
limited class of public men, Clay and Jackson were 
representatives at the time of which I am speaking, 
and Webster and Calhoun, though both probably 
superior intellectually to Clay and Jackson, were 
not. Neither were the new men from the new 
Southern states who now appeared in Washington. 
Many of them were at first supporters of Jackson, 
and some stood for a while with Clay. But it was 
not many years before they came to act as a rule 
with Calhoun and McDuffie, of South Carolina, 



THE LOWER SOUTH 57 

whenever there was a clear conflict between the 
interest they represented and any other interest 
whatsoever. 

What these men of slow voices and leisurely 
bearing and great capacity for intimate personal 
relationships and inbred fondness for power stood 
for at Washington was not slavery alone, not cot- 
ton and rice and sugar-cane alone, not agriculture 
alone, but the whole social organism, the whole 
civilization, whose decay in Virginia had been 
arrested^ by the rise of the states from which 
they came. They were committed to the main- 
tenance, in the most progressive country in the 
world, of a primitive industry, a primitive labor 
system, and a patriarchal mode of Hfe. They held 
that their main industry could be successfully 
prosecuted only with slave labor, and while it was 
so prosecuted it tended to exclude all other forms 
of industry. Its economic demands were impera- 
tive ; its political demands were hardly less imper- 
ative. Economically, it demanded that the fewest 
possible restrictions be placed upon the exchange 
of its two or three staple products for the products 
of other countries, and that it be permitted to 
extend itself constantly to fresh lands. Politi- 
cally, it demanded protection from criticism and 



58 THE LOWER SOUTH ^ 

from social and humanitarian reforms and changes. 
In order to enforce these economic and political 
demands, the representatives of the plantation in- 
terest must do more than stand on the defensive. 
They must not merely resist attack, they must 
prevent it. They must not only hold their own 
with the representatives of other sections, they 
must take the lead in the nation. They must be 
not the equals merely, but the superiors, of North- 
ern public men. In a word, they must rule. 

The compelling demand behind them, the defi- 
nite and specific nature of their task, was itself, in 
a time of obscured party divisions and but half 
understood antagonisms, a principal cause of their 
success. They had, further, the advantage of 
representing in Congress property as well as men ; 
for three-fifths of the slaves were counted in 
apportioning representatives to different states, 
and the slaves were, to all intents and purposes, 
save in politics, property, and not men. Particular 
Southern states counted the three-fifths of the 
slaves in laying out congressional districts and 
added only enough whites to make up a proper 
constituency. Whoever represented such a dis- 
trict at Washington was sure to be heartily com- 
mitted to the Southern system. 



THE LOWER SOUTH 



59 



Moreover, the Cotton states were sure of the 
support of Virginia and the upper South. How- 
ever the plantation system might decay there, 
whether the agricultural interest controlled there 
or not, the slaveholding interest was sure to be 
on their side; for the slaveholder of the upper 
South knew that the value of his slaves depended, 
not on the profits of his own tobacco plantation, 
but on the demand for slave labor on the rice and 
sugar and cotton plantations farther south. Very 
frequently, he sent numbers of his slaves south- 
ward, not to be sold, but to cultivate under an 
overseer a plantation of his own. The kinship of 
ideas and social usages between the two halves 
of the South was scarcely less potent than this 
partial identity of interests ; and if more were 
needed, there was the strong tie of blood kinship 
as well. The older line of a Virginian family, 
clinging to its first seat in the tide-water region, 
was not likely to antagonize the younger line in 
its new seat, modelled after the old, on the 
Mississippi or the Alabama. 

Allies in the North were not hard to find. There 
were manufacturers taking the places of the old 
merchant princes in the East, the fabric of whose 
fortunes was largely based on cotton ; and there 



6o THE LOWER SOUTH 

were other manufacturers, and merchants as well, 
who found in the South as it was a sure and pay- 
ing market, which might be lost somehow if the 
agitators had their way. It is not difficult to 
understand why abolitionism was so long asso- 
ciated with incendiarism and vagabondage in the 
East, or why there were so many clean shirts and 
broadcloth coats in the mobs that threatened 
Garrison and Phillips. In the West and North- 
west, a similar material interest could be relied on. 
The Northwestern farmer was bound to the lower 
South not merely by the fact that cotton was 
easily convertible into cash to pay for his bread- 
stuffs and his beef and bacon ; his interest also lay 
in the Southerner's refusal to make more than one 
appeal to the soil. He may never have reasoned 
the matter out, but he knew where his products 
went and he did not wish his customers disturbed. 
Moreover, the southern counties of the states 
above the Ohio were colonized largely by men of 
the Virginian stock, and Cincinnati and other 
rising Western cities owed to trade with the 
South almost as much of their prosperity as the 
country regions owed of theirs. Finally, there 
were to be found everywhere throughout the 
North devoted adherents of the principle of state 



THE LOWER SOUTH 6 1 

rights who could be counted on for help whenever 
the Southerners cried out against interference in 
their affairs; and there were many, though not 
so many, conservatives, who had their misgivings 
about the rapid extension of the suffrage — stead- 
fast supporters of the rights of property, who were 
sure to frown upon any revolutionary movements 
directed against vested interests. With the first 
class. Southern Democrats could always form 
alliances; with the second class. Southern Whigs 
were equally sure of fellowship. 

But when all these helps to leadership have been 
considered, one must still study the men of the 
lower South themselves in order to understand why 
they were so long successful against the economic 
and moral forces they had to fight with — against 
the whole tendency of modern thought, against the 
whole trend of American progress, against the true 
spirit of liberty. Early in the century, a speaker 
of the House of Representatives declared that he 
found himself embarrassed about committee assign- 
ments because there were so many representatives 
from the state of South Carolina whose abilities 
and experience gave them claims to the leading 
places. Calhoun's preeminence in South Carolina 
was not universally admitted until Lowndes was 



62 THE LOWER SOUTH 

dead; and it is doubtful if, a little later, even 
Calhoun's subtle reasoning on constitutional ques- 
tions should be rated higher than George Mc- 
Duffie's thorough mastery of the economics of the 
tariff discussion. The public men of the Gulf 
states were in some cases men who had first 
appeared in politics in the seaboard states; they 
were nearly always trained politicians of a school 
far different from that in which the merely clever 
and industrious machine politicians of our time are 
trained. They usually came into politics from the 
law, or from the headship of a plantation. If from 
the law, they might be self-made men, with the 
self-made man's hardihood and independence, yet 
they were apt to have acquired, as Andrew Jackson, 
and Calhoun, and McDuffie, for example, did 
acquire, the distinction of manner common to the 
large-planter class. If from the plantation, they 
were usually men who had successfully withstood 
the temptations of power and wealth and solitude ; 
and such men were the only class in America 
corresponding in character to the hereditary ruling 
class in other countries. The power and place 
which the owner of land and slaves in the Cotton 
states had might make a weak man weaker, but 
they were as sure to make a strong man stronger. 



THE LOWER SOUTH 63 

If the same conditions which in colonial Virginia 
starved out common schools and limited the intel- 
lectual development of the mass of landless white 
men did yet breed Washington and Henry, those 
conditions, intensified in the lower South, were as 
sure to breed strong leaders there as they were to 
limit the development of the mass. A study of the 
portraits and photographs of Southern statesmen 
of the old regime inspires one with the respect we 
always give to strength. These, one says of 
them, are such faces as might have belonged to 
the markgrafen of mediaeval Germany, to the lords 
of the marches in England and Scotland, or to 
those generals who, in the later ages of the Roman 
Empire, so often beat back the forces that have 
made modern Europe what it is. 

It is illuminating to review in outline the course 
these men took, and the power they exercised, 
on the great permanent questions which were so 
often debated during our period — the questions of 
taxation and revenue, internal improvements, public 
finance, and foreign affairs. 

It was on the tariff question that they first 
showed how much firmer they were than the 
Virginians and Kentuckians. South Carolina, an 
old state, and like Virginia, somewhat weakened, in 



64 THE LOWER SOUTH 

the matter of the energy of her men, by the south- 
westward emigration, felt more keenly than the 
new states the pinch that always came to a land 
exploited by the plantation system. Her most 
virile young men were apt to emigate; her best 
lands were exhausted. Moreover, Charleston, 
which had once bid fair to rival New York, still 
had possibilities of importance under free trade. 
McDuffie, of South Carolina, set forth first and 
most clearly the reason why protective tariffs 
could not fail to bear unequally on the Cotton 
states. A tax on their imports, he declared, was 
in effect a tax on their exports. They them- 
selves had nothing to protect. Their main prod- 
uct met with no dangerous competition either 
at home or abroad. The tariff duties imposed 
on their tools, their furniture, and everything 
else they got from England, might as well be 
imposed directly on the cotton they exported to 
pay for those things. Imposed either way, it 
meant simply that a bale of cotton would pur- 
chase fewer of the things which they wanted, 
and which they preferred to buy in England rather 
than in New York or Boston. To reply that the 
Cotton states could profit from protection by 
varying their industries was in effect to say 



THE LOWER SOUTH 65 

that they could do so by changing their whole 
labor system and the whole constitution of their 
society. 

The reasoning was perfectly sound, and prac- 
tically the whole lower South approved it. But 
the plan to enforce the reasoning by nullifying a 
law and threatening secession did not get the ap- 
proval of the whole lower South. The mass of 
the public men even of the Cotton states were 
still too much dominated by a genuine patriot- 
ism, and too devoted adherents of Andrew Jack- 
son, to go so far as their South Carolinian 
leaders, Calhoun and McDuffie, were ready to go. 
The fight that South Carolina made for an eco- 
nomic principle was not entirely unsuccessful. The 
fight she made for a constitutional theory was 
lost. Her defeat was due to the greater pros- 
perity, the greater hopefulness, and the genuine 
patriotism which prevailed in the younger states; 
her victory was due to the solidarity of all the Cot- 
ton states behind her on the economic question. 
Their congressmen voted for the compromise 
tariff of 1833, and constantly favored the anti- 
protective plan of ad valorem duties. When, 
after a long period of financial depression and 
failing revenues, higher duties were imposed, they 



66 THE LOWER SOUTH 

saw to it that the principle of protection got no 
more countenance than it did in 1842. It was 
Walker, of Mississippi, who in 1846 prepared the 
treasury report on tariff taxation which is oftenest 
contrasted with Hamilton's ; and the tariff law 
framed and passed by the Congress to which 
that report was addressed, whatever the actual 
rate of duties might seem to indicate, was 
more clearly in accordance with the principles 
of free trade, more clearly contrary to protec- 
tionist ideas and devices, than any other tariff 
law since 1789. The victory could never have 
been won, in the face of the development of 
those interests in the North which in later years 
have defeated or baffled every movement toward 
free trade, but for the more compact and solid 
front which the representatives of the plantation 
interests of the South — the only important body 
of interests aggressively opposed to protection 
— presented, through a long term of years, alike 
to Clay's followers in the West and to Webster's 
followers of the East. The victory bade fair to 
be a permanent one. Even Sumner, of Massa- 
chusetts, voted in 1857 for a tariff as distinctly 
revenue in principle as that of 1846 and far 
lower in its general rate of duties. Protection 



THE LOWER SOUTH 6/ 

was not revived until the lower South ceased to 
be represented at Washington. 

The other half of Clay's American policy 
fared no better. On the question of internal 
improvements, as on the tariff question, Calhoun 
was with him until it clearly appeared that the 
Cotton states were to have no part in that gen- 
eral industrial development which the second 
war with Gfeat Britain, by forcing us to depend 
on ourselves, had done so much to start, and 
which Clay's policies were meant to promote. 
But an influence far more powerful than Cal- 
houn's was enlisted against the policy of internal 
improvements, as it would doubtless also have 
been enlisted against protection but for the 
method which the CaroHnians took to fight it. 
Jackson himself early came to the conclusion that 
Congress had no right to appropriate money for 
the Maysville road. Like Monroe, he based his 
veto on constitutional grounds; and no doubt 
the constitutional objection had great weight 
with the majority of Southern men in Congress, 
who first sustained such vetoes, and then, grow- 
ing stronger and stronger, often relieved the 
successors of Jackson of the responsibility of the 
veto by defeating similar measures in one house 



6S THE LOWER SOUTH 

or the other. But the economic consideration, 
I feel sure, was also potent, though vaguely. In- 
ternal improvements and high tariffs went hand 
in hand; they were policies sprung from the 
same general motive and principle, and the 
same impulse that set the representatives of 
the plantation system against the one set them 
against the other also. The cotton planter felt 
that he paid more than his share of the expense 
of governmental enterprises, and he also felt 
that he got less than his share of the benefits. 
It is not probable that he made even to him- 
self a confession of the weakness of his indus- 
trial system which would prevent his getting 
a fair share of the fruits of a national policy, 
but he may have felt, as unstudious citizens 
often do, an antagonism of interests which he 
did not clearly reason out. A direct consequence 
of opening highways and dredging rivers and 
improving harbors is to thicken population, and 
the plantation system made for sparseness of 
population. Another effect is to build up cities, 
and few cities so built up were likely to arise 
below Mason and Dixon's line. In a word, the 
great majority of internal improvements could 
fully justify themselves, and confer the maximum 



THE LOWER SOUTH 69 

of benefits, only where industry could be diver- 
sified. They would benefit the new states of 
the Northwest, given over to free labor, far 
more than they could benefit the lower South. 

The attempts to revive the policy after its first 
overthrow grew feebler and feebler. A recent 
historian of political parties thinks that the Whigs 
might have had a better chance after 1850 if they 
had taken it up vigorously again. But almost the 
last words Clay ever pronounced in the senate- 
chamber were spoken in vain defence of a river 
and harbor bill carrying less than two and a 
half million dollars. The policy could not be 
revived successfully until the Cotton states with- 
drew from the Union. Only their withdrawal, and 
the subsequent military conquest of them, and the 
overthrow of their industrial system, made it possi- 
ble for a different set of industrial interests so to 
control Congress and the courts that nowadays a 
river and harbor bill, carrying tens of millions, 
encounters its most serious obstacle in the desire of 
individual congressmen to increase the total with 
provisions for the benefit of their particular dis- 
tricts and states. 

On questions of public finance, the influence of 
the men of the Cotton states, though not, perhaps, 



70 THE LOWER SOUTH 

SO controlling an influence, was a very strong one ; 
and in two very clear ways the plantation system 
helped to determine the course of Southern public 
opinion and public men on such questions. 

The first way was by preventing the growth 
of great cities. At the present time, no student of 
public finance needs to be told that the cities and 
the country districts are apt to take contrary sides 
in financial discussions, though the alignment 
has varied markedly from time to time in our his- 
tory. The Southern people had, as a rule, a coun- 
try view and not a city view of finance. The 
second way in which the plantation system^ had its 
effect in such controversies was more definite. 
It made it necessary to transact most of the 
business of exchange, and so created a strong 
demand for money, at one time of year, — the har- 
vest time, — while in other seasons there was very 
little business requiring the use of a medium of 
exchange. If the cotton planter found money 
scarce at the harvest time, he got less for his 
product, and had lesser balances accredited to him 
on the books of his agent at New Orleans or Mo- 
bile or Charleston ; but if the money supply in- 
creased at other seasons, he was a loser, because 
of the heightened charges entered against him 



THE LOWER SOUTH /I 

in his agent's books for the tools and supplies 
advanced to him while he planted and tended the 
next crop. This consideration was strong in all 
agricultural communities, but strongest where but 
one great crop was grown, and where agriculture 
was the only important industry. What the plant- 
ers of the country chiefly desired, therefore, and 
the cotton planters most of all, was a currency that 
could be expanded during the brief business sea- 
son in the autumn. They naturally favored state 
banks, because they were more amenable to the 
demands of regions remote from the great centres 
of business than a national bank or any system of 
national banks could well be. Their remoteness 
from the great centres, and their unfamiliarity 
with large business operations, naturally inspired 
them with fear and distrust of such an institution 
as the Bank of the United States. A few of the 
larger planters, who had a Hking for such insti- 
tutions as seemed clearly to promote the stability 
of the country, and an affihation with propertied 
men of all sections, probably did not share this 
fear. But as Mr. Cairnes points out, the very 
largest planters were generally borrowers, because 
their constant tendency was to enlarge their 
holdings, and so they, as well as other classes in 



72 



THE LOWER SOUTH 



the Cotton states, were generally drawn to favor 
state banks, with abundant power to issue notes 
and lend them on all sorts of securities. Presi- 
dent Jackson got much support from the South 
throughout his long fight with the national bank. 
All the states of the lower South had their bank 
systems, their flush times, and their experiments of 
cheap money, and all suffered severely from the 
collapse and reaction that followed. That experi- 
ence the West had also, and the blame for the 
state banks cannot be put upon the South alone. 
But the growth of population and of cities in the 
West brought about a different feeUng there on 
questions of finance, while the South remained 
as it was. As to the national bank, the succes- 
sive attempts to revive it were usually opposed 
by Southern opinion and resisted by the mass of 
Southern public men. As we know, those attempts 
were not successful, and in finance, as in the mat- 
ter of tariffs and internal improvements, the so- 
called national policy was not revived until the 
lower South was no longer represented in Con- 
gress. 

On these great domestic questions, then, the 
power of the lower South was exercised quite 
consistently on the side which Jefferson would 



THE LOWER SOUTH 73 

most probably have taken. It was directed, in 
general, against those forces which tended to 
strengthen the government at Washington. And 
yet, when the old Republican party was divided, 
the great planters and their associates did not, as 
a rule, join the Democratic party. On the con- 
trary, probably a majority of them were Whigs. 
We know, at least, that in most Southern states 
the districts which usually returned Whigs to 
Congress were the districts in which the big 
plantations, the rich black lands, and the bulk 
of the slaves were found. These men were 
influenced by such general considerations and 
sympathies, and maintained such a generally 
conservative attitude toward society, as would 
have made them Tories in England. Still, whether 
the great planter was a Whig or a Democrat, 
he usually stood with his fellows whenever the 
interests of his section or his class were clearly 
threatened, and so did the Southern Whigs at 
Washington. 

But the greatest of the victories which the 
plantation interest won at Washington was not 
won in the advocacy of a Jeffersonian weak-gov- 
ernment policy, but of a poHcy which, as we 
have been often told of late, inevitably tends to 



74 THE LOWER SOUTH ~ 

Strengthen a national government at the expense 
of smaller communities, no less than at the expense 
of the liberty of individuals. These triumphs were 
won in the foreign relations of the RepubHc. The 
power of the plantation and the slave availed not 
merely to keep the government from doing things 
but also to make the government do things of a 
very positive sort. It could lower tariffs, and stop 
the progress of the Maysville road, and over- 
throw the bank ; it could also organize armies and 
fleets, it could extend our Hmits, it could play a 
part in that world movement of the English stock 
which we to-day understand so much more clearly, 
and approve or condemn so much more intelli- 
gently, than we ever did before. 

It would be a mistake to attribute the course of 
the public men of the lower South on domestic 
questions entirely to the economic demands of their 
industrial system, ignoring the character, the po- 
litical connections, the inherited sympathies and 
tendencies, of the people. Similarly, it would be 
a mistake to attribute their course on foreign 
questions entirely to the demand for fresh lands 
for slavery to spread into, clearly as we can suit 
the effect to the cause. In this also, less plain, 
less definite forces were at work. Expansion is 



THE LOWER SOUTH 75 

characteristic of young and strong peoples; it 
is a marked characteristic of the English-speaking 
peoples. Of the two or three white stocks that 
peopled the lower South, not one was wanting in 
the adventurous pioneer impulse; indeed, the 
generaHzation is reasonably true of the whole 
American people up to the time of which we are 
speaking. In the North, that impulse spent itself 
somewhat in business. In the South, what took the 
place of business was not of a nature to satisfy 
it. Moreover, the South was closer to those 
Latin-American States which alone, in those days 
before the Golden Gate of the Pacific had been 
opened, tempted adventurous Americans with 
their weakness and their show of wealth. What 
wonder, then, that the Southern planter, moody 
with the loneliness and monotony of his life, felt 
within him, from time to time, stirrings of the old 
adventurous spirit } What wonder if, even though 
his peculiar social system gave within a few years 
a look of antiquity to communities whose whole 
life was compassed by the lifetime of one man, he 
soon longed for fresh experiences, enemies to fight, 
strange civilizations to penetrate and overthrow? 
Into the dull recitative of his plantation days there 
broke, again and again, the bold, clear notes of 



"je THE LOWER SOUTH 

the old buccaneer theme. He could not, like 
Ralegh and Drake and Hawkins, pursue his race 
ideal over the salt seas, but the mystery of the 
Southwestern plains was not less tempting. That 
way, too, the track of the Spaniard led; and to 
the southeastward, almost in sight from the Florida 
coast, were other Spaniards to despoil. Arkan- 
sas, the last of the Southern states to be carved 
out of the Louisiana purchase, was not yet in 
the Union, when men like Bowie and Travis and 
Crockett and Houston were already in Texas. 
A little later, filibuster expeditions were landing 
on the coast of Cuba, and the public men of the 
lower South at Washington, turning more and 
more from small things to great, were directing 
American diplomacy to the purchase of Cuba and 
the annexation of Texas. 

No doubt, the economic and political exigencies 
of slavery had their part in all this. Already, in 
the forties, some lands were exhausted even in 
so new a country as Alabama. To maintain its 
equaHty in the Senate, the South must get more 
slave states somewhere. But surely it is not nec- 
essary to attribute to a particular and reasoned 
motive alone what resulted before, and has resulted 
since, from a simple and general impulse. In the 



THE LOWER SOUTH 77 

face of very recent history, it is hard to deny that 
the filibusters and the Texans were doing just 
what their ancestors had been doing for four 
hundred years, and what we did but yesterday. If 
we look for a parallel to the Alamo, where none 
would fly while escape was possible, and not one 
man yielded when all hope of victory was gone, or 
to Crittenden's desperate enterprise in Cuba, we 
find it in no land battle, but in the last fight of 
the Revenge^ and Grenville's order to the master- 
gunner " to split and sinke the shippe; that thereby 
nothing might remaine of glorie or victorie to the 
Spaniards." Slavery had to do with the seizure 
of Texas and the attempts upon Cuba. But we 
may not attribute to that alone this single act in 
the long drama which began before the first slave 
landed in Virginia and ended in 1898. The true 
cause of it was that old land hunger which half 
the world has not satisfied. If Southern adven- 
turers and Southern statesmen took the lead in it, 
their leadership was due to their whole training 
and character and life ; it was not due entirely to 
the fact that they were slave-owners, and that 
slavery must keep spreading or perish. 

In Texas, they had their way with little diffi- 
culty. The first fight, for the independence of the 



78 THE LOWER SOUTH 

state, being won, the second fight, for annexation, 
was sure to go in their favor. We all know how 
Tyler was brought into line for annexation ; how 
Clay, in his last effort to win the presidency, lost 
the votes of the Free-soil men by disclaiming, in 
certain letters to an Alabama slaveholder, all 
opposition to admitting Texas save from the fear 
that the Union might be endangered ; and how, as 
against Polk, an avowed annexationist, he failed 
to win any votes by his concession to the lower 
South. When the last act came on, and Mexico 
had to be conquered, it was mainly volunteers from 
the Cotton states, joined by a few of their North- 
ern friends, like Franklin Pierce, who swelled 
our little army to the strength the enterprise 
demanded. As it happened, Taylor, who fought 
his way to the presidency in that war, was a 
Louisianian and a planter, and among those who 
followed him was his son-in-law, Jefferson Davis. 
Quitman, who had once resigned his place as 
governor of Mississippi in order to stand a trial 
for filibustering, raised the flag over the city 
of Mexico. A host of new names, with which 
the whole world rang a few years later, were 
first made known by honorable mention in the 
despatches. The whole enterprise, from the 



THE LOWER SOUTH 



79 



Alamo to Cherubusco, and all that came of it 
in new territories and new states, was part of 
the record of the lower South' s ascendency in 
the Union. 

But the sailing in Cuban waters was rougher 
then than it has proved in our time. Northern 
opposition did not indeed prevail in that matter any 
more than in the Texas movement. It was con- 
ciliated or beaten down so effectually that Bu- 
chanan could be elected President after signing the 
Ostend Manifesto, which declared that, if Spain 
refused to sell us Cuba, necessity, and particularly 
military necessity, might justify us in seizing it. 
But filibustering failed. Soule, the fiery Creole, 
sent to Madrid with a special view to getting us 
Cuba, found duelHng pistols and small swords no 
more effective instruments than notes and mani- 
festos against Spain's firm resolve to keep her 
hold on the island which seemed so ready to fall 
into our grasp. For once, the ancient enemy pre- 
vailed; and none of us can fail to admire the pride, 
the dignity, the majesty, of the defiance she sent 
back to us then, even in the light which has since 
been thrown upon her weakness. It is curious that 
the first reverse the men of the lower South ever 
met in their thirty years of rule and conquest should 



80 THE LOWER SOUTH 

have come from such a source. The contrast is 
striking between their steady and masterful prog- 
ress to their end in the controversy with Mexico 
and the fiasco which came of every attempt they 
made upon Cuba. 

But in all things else their ascendency at Wash- 
ington at the middle of the century was clearer 
than ever. Save when a president died in office, 
the White House was generally occupied either 
by a Southerner of their own band or by a North- 
ern man of their choice. In the lower House of 
Congress, the great committees were commonly 
headed by their representatives. Two chairmen 
of the Ways and Means Committee came from the 
particular Cotton state of which I have spoken. 
In the Senate, as Calhoun and Webster and Clay 
successively disappeared, the true leaders were 
such men as Butler, of South CaroHna, Toombs 
and Cobb, of Georgia, Benjamin and Soule, of 
Louisiana, William R. King, and C. C. Clay, of 
Alabama, and Jefferson Davis of Mississippi. The 
representatives and senators from New Eng- 
land, many of them able and accomplished men, 
had no more leadership than their predecessors 
had in those days, just before the reply to Hayne, 
when a New England congressman could be rec- 



THE LOWER SOUTH 8l 

ognized by his deprecatory manner. Western men 
were frequently in alliance with the Southerners, 
as in the case of Douglas and Cass. Men from 
the Middle states, like Buchanan, went even far- 
ther to promote their ends. Those who occasion- 
ally stood out against them did so at the expense 
of any ambition they might entertain for the high- 
est places. In cabinet after cabinet, the leading 
places went to them and their friends. The 
Supreme Court, under Taney, was as little likely 
to thwart them as Congress or the President, for 
the majority of the court was now guided by 
Jefferson's ideas of the government, instead of 
Marshall's. 

It remains for us to follow them in the fight 
they had to make for the fruits of their victories — 
to see them meeting a resistance, for the first time 
truly firm and wise, which in the Northwest en- 
larged into a great political movement that which 
in the Northeast had been merely a protest. We 
shall see them trampling upon the antislavery 
sentiment of New England, only to find the hateful 
seed bursting out of Western prairies vaster than 
their own Black Belt. We shall see them profiting 
in election after election by the folly of Free-soil- 
ers and Liberty men, only to suffer by the rise of 



82 THE LOWER SOUTH 

the Republicans. We shall see them hanging 
John Brown with all the right forms and generous 
delays of a just law, only to face, over the grave of 
a misguided visionary, that practical, reasonable, 
pliant, and unconquerable force of public opin- 
ion which Abraham Lincoln, sprung obscurely 
from their own Virginian line, was sent into the 
world to summon up, to guide, to restrain, and to 
obey. 



THE FINAL STRUGGLE IN THE UNION 

Our examination, though it be not in detail, of 
the civilization of the Cotton states, and of the 
effects of the rise of those states on the political 
history of the whole country up to the year 1850, 
permits us now to examine, still in broad outline, 
the motives, the character, and the larger signifi- 
cance of the last struggle which the champions 
of that civilization made to maintain its political 
ascendency in the Union. The struggle for 
ascendency was, in fact, a struggle for existence. 
As I have tried to point out, the lower South 
was from the beginning under a necessity either 
to control the national government or radically 
to change its own industrial and social system. 

Let us first, still keeping, so far as possible, our 
inside point of view, and looking out upon the 
whole country from the windows, as it were, of 
the civilization which we have been studying, try 
to see what dangers the Southerner of 1850 had 
to guard against, what enemies he had to fight. 

On nearly all of the domestic questions debated 
S3 



84 THE LOWER SOUTH 

between 1820 and 1850, the men of the lower 
South had been on that side which a certain gen- 
eral theory of government, the Jeffersonian Demo- 
cratic theory, might have led them to take, and did 
lead many Northern men to take, quite without ref- 
erence to sectional interests and antagonisms. That 
general theory undoubtedly had great weight with 
the Southerners themselves. We know that South- 
erners could be so influenced, for a contrary gen- 
eral view of the government prevailed quite ap- 
preciably among Southerners of certain classes, 
although in cases of a clear conflict of sectional 
interests over specific subjects the conflict of gen- 
eral theories among themselves rarely availed seri- 
ously to divide the men of the lower South, how- 
ever it might divide the men of Virginia and the 
border states. Nevertheless, as we have seen, the 
course of the lower South on these great domestic 
questions was also in accord with the economic and 
political demands of its civilization, and it must be 
said that its public men had their way on all of 
them. 

In consequence, there was now no serious 
threat to their civilization from the tariff, from the 
policy of internal development and improvement, or 
from the system of public finance. Whether or 



THE LOWER SOUTH 85 

not those general principles on which the public 
men of the Cotton states had acted in domestic 
affairs while they were ruling the country were 
just principles, good for the whole country, at 
least the North made, in 1850, no such resist- 
ance to their policies as to reveal any clear con- 
flict of industrial interests or to show any reason 
why, so far as the tariff, finance, and ordinary 
governmental enterprises were concerned, the two 
social orders, unlike as they were, might not go 
on existing side by side under the government at 
Washington, so long as the government's ener- 
gies were confined within the limits assigned to it 
by the majority of state rights judges now on the 
supreme bench. So long as the North did not 
revolt against declining tariff rates, or insistently 
demand internal improvements, or try to tear 
down the subtreasuries and clamor for a bank, it 
could not be said that there was any irrepressible 
conflict of an industrial sort. The very unlike- 
ness of the two systems seemed to preclude rivalry 
while they were confined to separate regions. 

So, too, in the matter of foreign relations. No 
important Northern interest was distinctly endan- 
gered by that aggressive foreign policy which the 
Southern leaders initiated in the forties. The 



86 THE LOWER SOUTH 

tendency of such a policy to strengthen the na- 
tional government was certainly not apt to arouse 
any violent Northern opposition. Its tendency 
to enlarge the republic physically appealed to a 
feeling which, however absorption in business and 
in the occupation of the West may have obscured 
it, was just as strong in Northern men as in South- 
ern men. It had not as yet led to any great 
increase in the size and expense of our military 
and naval establishments. It had brought us into 
no entanglements or conflicts inimical to the trade 
of Eastern cities. 

So far, then, as hindsight avails us, thoughtful 
Southerners in 1850 could not have seen, though 
in point of fact some restless Southern minds per- 
suaded themselves that they did see, any threat 
to their civilization from specific material interests 
in the North. Some Southerners did contend that 
what was left of the protective system was stifling 
their main industry, which could only grow to its 
full proportions in an atmosphere of absolute free 
trade; and some, that manufactures could be 
developed below Mason and Dixon's line if only 
that line could be made the boundary between sep- 
arate nations, and the people south of it roused to 
a proper sense of the ignominy of buying ploughs 



THE LOWER SOUTH Sy 

and hoes and furniture and books from Yankees 
simply because Yankees made them better and 
sold them cheaper. There were Charlestonians 
who could not understand why Charleston had 
stopped growing and New York and Boston had 
kept on, unless it was because- the government 
somehow helped New York and Boston at the 
expense of Charleston. Such ideas were often 
advanced in the Southern commercial conventions, 
which were held so frequently, and so well at- 
tended, that they may be taken to indicate a 
feeling of industrial unrest and discontent ; but 
they did not mislead the whole Southern people. 
Yancey, the Secessionist, once plainly stated a 
contrary view when he said that in Washington 
there were two temples, — one for the South, and 
one for the North. The first was the Capitol, 
where Southern public men had so long exercised 
a power out of all proportion to their numbers and 
to the numbers they represented. The other was 
the Patent Office, where the untrammelled intellect 
of the North, dealing with material problems, had 
registered its triumphs. To make his figure fairer 
still, he might have joined the National Library 
to the Patent Office, for the Northern intellect, 
though it had made no contribution of the first 



88 THE LOWER SOUTH 

value to the world's inquiry into the things of the 
spirit, had, nevertheless, already freed America from 
the reproach of literary barrenness and proved that 
our civilization could bear other fruit than wealth. 
And it was the belated concern of the Northern 
mind about the things of the spirit, not its absorp- 
tion in material enterprises, that boded ill to the 
plantation system. It was the North's moral 
awakening, and not its industrial alertness, its 
free thought, and not its free labor, which the 
Southern planter had to fear. The New England 
factory made no threat, the town meeting did. 
The Northwestern wheat farms and pork pack- 
eries and railways were harmless; but Oberlin 
College and Lovejoy's printing-press and the un- 
derground railway were different. It was not 
the actual material ascendency of the North which 
endangered the plantation system, though sooner 
or later, by sheer weight of population, the politi- 
cal ascendency of the South might have been over- 
come. The true danger from without was in the 
moral and intellectual forces which were at once 
the cause and the result of the North's prog- 
ress. It was in that freedom of individual men 
which had made the North prosper, and in that 
national feeling, that national theory of the govern- 



THE LOWER SOUTH 89 

ment, that national antagonism to whatever was 
weak or ahen under the flag, which had resulted 
from the development and the denser peopling 
of the North. The final conflict came only when 
these things were thrown clearly into competition 
with the picturesque Old World social system, the 
limited nationalism, the unprogressive industrial 
contrivances of the South for the occupation of 
new lands. The frontal attacks of the abolitionist 
light brigade could enrage and annoy the planter, 
but they could not seriously weaken the planta- 
tion system. The Free-soil emigrant could and 
did endanger it. 

But he did not overthrow it. The end, unlike 
as it was in the way it came about to the aboli- 
tionists* fevered fancies, was equally unlike the 
emigrant's saner forethought. It did not come 
through the slow dying out of a thing that must 
spread or perish. It came through the defiant act 
of the Southerners themselves. The revolt of the 
North could have done no more than put slavery 
on the way to extinction ; that was Lincoln's 
hope, as it had been Jefferson's. We cannot see 
clearly what actually happened unless we again go 
inside of Southern civilization, observe the forces 
that threatened it from within, and humanly un- 



90 THE LOWER SOUTH 

derstand what purposes and impulses governed 
the Southerners themselves while they were fight- 
ing these as well as the enemies from without. 
For notwithstanding all the triumphs they had 
won in legislation, in diplomacy, and on Mexican 
battlefields, the people of the lower South were 
themselves growing discontent. That which had 
happened in Virginia and along the Atlantic sea- 
board was coming about on the Gulf, though it 
was not yet entirely come about, because the 
Gulf states were still very young, and only the 
richest of their lands were exhausted. But in 
the very shrillness and fierceness of the replies 
that the men of the South made to every attack 
on their system one detects their own restlessness 
under its limitations. Let us remember that they 
were still the purest representatives on the con- 
tinent of its very strongest stocks. Unlike the 
Spaniards who first explored their lands, and 
who, in Mexico and South America, had inter- 
mingled and intermarried with weaker races, these 
Englishmen and Scotch-Irishmen and French 
Huguenots, though they mingled and intermarried 
with each other, and got strength thereby, had 
guarded themselves, by perpetuating an institu- 
tion out of keeping with their times, from the very 



THE LOWER SOUTH 9I 

possibility of anything like equality, not to say 
intermingling, with the lesser tribes. There was 
never, for them, any danger of that course. The 
same institution which hampered them in their 
efforts to keep pace with their fellows in the 
North and in old England kept alive in them 
every impulse and characteristic with which their 
fellows had begun. 

They did not, as the Virginians had done, 
begin to question the wisdom or rightness of their 
life. Before they reached that point. Northern 
abolitionists had raised the question first. The 
abolitionists, like all forerunners and prophets, 
were more intent on discharging their message 
than on the actual effect of it. They did not 
hint and insinuate and reason gently, as even 
a man of the world does when he tries to help 
his friend out of an error ; they did not, like the 
true model of all reformers, combine the wis- 
dom of serpents and the harmlessness of doves. 
They merely lifted up their voices and spared 
not. That they were dealing with the proudest 
and most sensitive people in the world did not 
occur to them any more than it seems to occur 
to those well-meaning persons who, intent mainly 
on freeing their own minds and keeping their 



92 THE LOWER SOUTH 

own skirts clean, stand afar off and tell the 
Southerners of our own day how very badly they 
are doing under the conditions left to them by 
defeat in war and the reconstruction of their 
governments by alien hands. Making men the 
subject of withering editorials and fiercely de- 
nunciatory sermons is not a particularly wise way 
to help them. Objurgation — the objurgatory 
method of reform — is effective sometimes with 
weak men, particularly if it is accompanied with 
a show of force; it is sometimes, I believe, suc- 
cessfully employed with refractory mules. But 
objurgation from afar off, without any show or 
threat of force behind it, could hardly accom- 
plish anything with men like those of the lower 
South. So far as the early abolitionist move- 
ment had any effect at all on these men, it was 
to confirm them in their adherence to an order 
of things which they, like the Virginians, would 
surely have come to question when they were 
made to feel its economic shortcomings. Aboli- 
tionism as a force in Northern society was 
valuable and admirable, leavening the whole 
mass ; it was the right and natural way for the 
Northern revolt to begin. Abolitionism as it ap- 
peared to Southern society was an interference 



THE LOWER SOUTH 93 

from without, harsh and cruel and unjust, dis- 
playing constantly its ignorance of essential facts, 
and proceeding on lines contrary to the human 
nature alike of the master, whom it attacked so 
bitterly, and of the slave himself, who would 
never have understood its appeal, and who never 
would have loved the foremost leaders in it any 
more than those leaders themselves would have 
relished the close personal relations with Afri- 
cans which the Southern master did not find 
unpleasant. 

The leading men of the lower South displayed 
a constantly heightening pride, and a more and 
more stubborn unwillingness to concede anything 
whatever to the outside opponents of their sys- 
tem. On the contrary, they set to work vigor- 
ously debating the best means of extending it 
and all possible means of engrafting upon it 
those modern appliances by which science has 
revolutionized the methods of production. They 
tried to bring it into some sort of harmony, 
crude and primitive as it was, with modern life. 
They had some reason, some truth, behind them. 
No industrial system similar to the North's could 
possibly be established while the main part of the 
laboring population of the South was made up of 



94 THE LOWER SOUTH 

ignorant Africans, no matter whether they were 
slaves or not. Whether Alexander H. Stephens was 
right or wrong when he said that the South should 
act on the principle that white men are naturally 
superior to black men, thirty-five years of freedom 
have proved, what Lincoln seems to have under- 
stood, that the real cause of all the trouble was 
not slavery, but the presence of Africans in the 
South in large numbers. The leaders of Southern 
thought in the forties and fifties were trying to do 
just what the leading men of the South are trying 
to do now, viz. : to discover some way or ways by 
which a society made up of whites and blacks in 
almost equal proportions can keep pace with a 
society made up of whites only. Their plan was 
to keep the blacks at the bottom, the whites on 
top. It did not succeed very well, but it suc- 
ceeded better than the plan adopted in Recon- 
struction times of putting the blacks on top and 
the whites at the bottom. Whether the third 
plan of setting both on the same level and letting 
them work out their destiny side by side will ever, 
human nature, black and white, being what it is, 
have a chance to show its superiority to the other 
two plans, is a question which even to-day no man 
can answer. 



' THE LOWER SOUTH 95 

The Southerners of the fifties had not much 
success in their efforts to improve and extend 
their industrial system without essentially chang- 
ing it. They made an especial effort to improve 
their methods of transportation. Their enthusiasm 
over railroads was equal to their earlier enthusiasm 
over banks. In Alabama, the particular Cotton 
state which I have chosen for purposes of illustra- 
tion, there was a sort of frenzy over railroads in 
the middle of the fifties. A whole system of trunk 
lines was planned, and notwithstanding the vetoes 
of a sound Jeffersonian Democrat in the gov- 
ernor's office, the state's money and credit were 
used to promote the enterprise. At the same 
time, stirred up by the report of an accomplished 
state geologist, the people began at last to 
take into serious consideration the great mineral 
resources which Sir Charles Lyell had noted a 
decade or two earlier. A young civil engineer 
was commissioned to survey a railroad through 
what the legislature called " the mineral region," 
meaning the region of which Birmingham is now 
the centre, but he declared that he had no idea 
where the mineral region was. The governor who 
signed his commission could not tell him. Never- 
theless, the work was done, and it is interesting 



96 THE LOWER SOUTH 

to know that in Alabama and other Southern 
states those developments which have come 
about in our own day were at least planned 
nearly fifty years ago. Whether the plans could 
ever have been carried out with slave labor, or 
whether white labor could have been induced to 
undertake them, is one of the questions which the 
Civil War left unsettled. However one may be 
inclined to answer it, they never were carried out, 
the schemes and devices of the Southern leaders 
to add other industries to agriculture without get- 
ting rid of slavery never brought any important 
results, and the civilization of the Cotton states con- 
tinued to be threatened from within by the same 
inevitable decay which had come upon Virginia 
and the Carolinas. That threat, the conscious- 
ness of that danger, the restlessness of strong 
men under it, conspiring with the abolitionist 
threat from without, had its first important result 
in the rise of a party in the lower South parallel and 
comparable to the abolitionist party of the East. 

I have said of the abolition movement that so 
far as its effects on Northern public opinion are 
concerned, it was an admirable thing, an indispen- 
sable thing. It was comparable to the first begin- 
nings of the Protestant revolt against papal abuses, 



THE LOWER SOUTH 97 

to the martyrdoms in which the great Puritan revolt 
in England had its rise, to the work of Rousseau 
and the encyclopedists in France. The strange, 
hard, fervid life of New England, though it brought 
forth our most notable literature, our chief educa- 
tional movements, and a great part of our wealth, 
found its rightest outburst and culmination in 
that unreasoning, unpractical, magnificent assault 
upon the very pillars of the social order, en- 
dangering the whole if only it might strike the 
wrong so long enthroned in high places. The 
sense of human brotherhood which Puritanism 
had formerly repressed, or turned into religious 
fervor ; the zeal of a priesthood stripped of its old 
authority and no longer confident of the divine 
source of its mission ; the sudden impulse of 
philanthropy in men and women whose own lives 
had in them nothing to explain how a slave could 
bear his servitude or a master could be other 
than cruel ; the breedings of long winter evenings 
over the outer world which New England had 
not yet brought to her own doors ; the village 
schoolmarm's hidden passion of protest ; the free- 
thinker's clear-eyed insight into the hollowness of 
every appeal to the past for authority to enthrall 
the present; the spirit of Brook Farm and the 



98 THE LOWER SOUTH 

genius of the town meeting : — all these New 
England ideals and impulses went into that 
movement, and the movement itself was the be- 
ginning of that wider popular movement which 
finally freed the North from the rule of the planter. 
It was the essence of New England's aspiration, 
the last distinctive expression of New England 
character. 

Few historians have yet found time to fol- 
low the parallel movement to the southward. 
The Southern leaders in Washington forced 
gag rules through Congress to keep out aboli- 
tionist petitions. They suborned the postal ser- 
vice to their ends and got abolitionist literature 
debarred from the mails. They invaded the North 
and dragged slaves back to their plantations. 
They browbeat liberty men in Congress. They 
hanged John Brown. Whenever they failed to 
crush out abolitionism, it was because there was 
in the nature of things no way to reach it, not 
because Northern public men kept them from 
having their will upon it. But the Southern 
leaders who had gained and meant to keep the 
ascendency at Washington were not so successful 
in dealing with the discontent at home. The 
secessionist movement in the Cotton states began 



THE LOWER SOUTH 99 

as early as the abolitionist movement in New- 
England, and it won in the end a far clearer 
popular victory. Just as abolitionism, although 
aimed at the South, was most dangerous immedi- 
ately to the compromise men of the North, so the 
secession movement, aimed at the North, was 
from the first a struggle with the moderate men 
and the Union sentiment of the South. The abo- 
litionists were willing to endanger the Union in 
order to attack slavery and the plantation sys- 
tem ; the secessionists were willing to destroy the 
Union in order to defend them. Union men. 
North and South, drew together when, in the 
struggle over the territory acquired from Mexico, 
all the antagonisms were at once revealed : when 
the industrial system of the North claimed the new 
lands because it had proved itself the better system, 
while the plantation system demanded them because 
it must spread, and because Southern blood had 
won them ; when two contrary theories of the na- 
tional government were set forth to guide Congress 
and the courts in dealing with the crisis ; when the 
abolitionists cried out against the Constitution as 
a covenant with sin, and the fire-eaters heaped 
scornful epithets upon Clay and all other devisers 
of makeshifts and patchers-up of compromises. 
LoFC. 



lOO THE LOWER SOUTH 

We all know who the leaders of the compromise 
movement were ; we all know who the leaders of 
the popular movement against compromise in the 
North were ; few of us can now recall even the 
names of the men who led the movement against 
compromise in the South. The peacemakers 
and the abolitionists have their place in history 
fixed ; the fire-eaters are forgotten. 

Yet the pen of Garrison and the voice of 
Phillips had their counterparts in the Cotton 
states. William Gil more Sims, Beverly Tucker, 
and a host of others, defended slavery in the 
press. Calhoun, on the brink of the grave, mut- 
tered fearful prophecies of coming disaster. 
When he passed from the scene, Davis and 
Toombs and Quitman took up the cause. But 
of all these voices of the South, the clearest 
and the fiercest came from the heart of the Cotton 
Empire, from Alabama, from William L. Yancey. 
Neglected by historians, his was yet a leading role 
in the action behind the scenes : for he spoke, 
not to legislatures nor to Congress, but to the 
people themselves. If Wendell Phillips was the 
orator of abolition, if Clay was the orator of 
compromise, Yancey was the orator of secession. 
More clearly, more eloquently, and more effec- 



THE LOWER SOUTH lOI 

tively than any other, he urged that the Cotton 
states could not compromise, for compromise was 
surrender. Slavery must have room or perish. 
The South must have what it felt to be its right, 
or lose its honor. 

Garrison and Phillips never had their way. The 
territorial controversy was compromised in 1850 
by a plan of Clay's that proposed to leave the 
settlement of the question to the people of the 
territories themselves when they should be ready to 
come into the Union. A more effective fugitive- 
slave law was passed. Neither New England nor 
any other part of the country acted on the theory 
that it was right to disregard the claims of the 
Union itself because the Union was a compromise 
with slavery. The idea that the destruction of 
slavery was more important than the preservation 
of the Union was never accepted by any large num- 
ber of men. The actual process by which slavery 
was in the end overthrown was in fact quite for- 
eign to the purposes of the avowed abolitionists. 
They contributed to the result only by arousing 
the conscience of the North, not by devising any 
plan of action and getting the North to adopt it. 

The extreme men in the South were also 
defeated, twice defeated. They were beaten in 



102 THE LOWER SOUTH 

1848, when they tried to commit one of the great 
parties — the Democratic — to the position that 
Congress must guarantee to every slaveholder 
the right to go into the new territories with his 
property, without regard to the action of any terri- 
torial legislature. They were beaten again when, 
after Congress had passed Clay's compromise 
measures, they appealed to the people of the 
Cotton states to resist. The people of the Cotton 
states, like the rest of the country, indorsed the 
compromise, and waited to see how it would work. 
The majority of them seemed to think that the 
plantation and the slave were still safe in the 
Union ; or else, loving the Union, they were will- 
ing to risk something in order that they might 
continue to live in it. 

And then, for a moment, it began to look as if 
they were really going to have all they could ask 
inside the Union, as if the plantation and the 
slave were going to dominate more clearly than 
ever in the councils of the Republic. I mean, of 
course, when Douglas, a candidate for the presi- 
dency, a Northern man with Southern views, 
persuaded Congress in 1854 to throw open to 
slavery, in the same way that the Mexican cession 
was open to slavery, a region which had been 



• THE LOWER SOUTH 103 

given over to free labor since the compromise of 
1820. I have spoken of the Mexican cession as 
the crowning triumph of the public men of the 
Cotton states, and so it was. The opening of 
Kansas to slavery in 1854 was, indeed, a greater 
defeat for the antislavery men, a more humiliating 
indignity to the opponents of slavery, than any- 
thing they had yet endured. But it can hardly 
be set down as the achievement of Southern men. 
Many moderate slave-owners were in fact surprised 
at it. More clearly than almost any other impor- 
tant event in our history, it was the work of one 
man — Douglas. Although it came to them as a 
consequence of their ascendency, the slave-owners 
accepted it as a gift, and not as a reward of their 
own labors. Yancey, however, found very few to 
agree with him when he contended that even the 
gift was unacceptable because it seemed to come 
with a reservation in favor of the ultimate right 
of the people who might occupy the new terri- 
tories to say for themselves whether they would 
have slavery or not. 

But the act of Douglas was in reality fraught 
with more immediate danger to slavery than the 
events of 1848 and 1850. The Mexican War and 
the triumph therein of cotton and slavery had 



104 ^^-^ LOWER SOUTH 

angered tens of thousands of Northern men ; the 
Kansas bill angered hundreds of thousands. A 
year or two later, the Supreme Court of the coun- 
try ranged itself squarely on the side of the 
South ; but a mightier force than Congress, or 
courts, or armies, was against it — the force of 
public opinion. Garrison and Phillips had done 
their work ; Clay had done his ; Douglas, his. 
Now at last the slumbering giant was aroused. 

Blindly feeling about for a minister who should 
give them both their desires, the preservation of 
the Union and the destruction of slavery, the 
people of the North found Abraham Lincoln, and 
the end of dispute and compromise was near. 
No longer confined to such methods of opposi- 
tion as underground railways and personal liberty 
bills, which brought them in conflict with the law, 
and clearly violated that understanding between 
the two sections, — morally binding on many men, 
whether or not it was regarded as a compact, — 
which was set forth in the Constitution itself, 
the antislavery sentiment of the North had at 
last a definite and constitutional plan of action. 
Free labor poured into Kansas, and the weaker 
system went to the wall before the stronger. 
The Republican party was formed, not to attack 



' THE LOWER SOUTH 105 

slavery in the states where it already existed, but 
to strangle it by keeping it out of the territories. 
But if Northern men thought that the men of 
the lower South were going to give up the initia- 
tive, and stand merely on the defensive, after 
thirty years of power and conquest, they had 
profited little by their abundant opportunity to 
study the temper of their rulers. In the accounts 
of this period by Southern writers, the South is 
generally represented as standing entirely on the 
defensive, and there is a sense in which that is 
true. As I have tried to make plain, they could 
not defend their system without controlling the 
government. Their attitude was like Sir Anthony 
Absolute's in " The Rivals " : " You know I am 
compliance itself — when I am not thwarted ; no 
one more easily led — when I have my own way." 
They were on the defensive as Lee was on the 
defensive when he protected Richmond by invad- 
ing Pennsylvania. For my own part, I think 
better of those men because, masters so long, 
they were masterful to the last. One can rejoice 
when a strong man, taking a high and proud 
course, is reclaimed and humbled by the sympathy 
and tenderness of his friends. But the same man, 
if he be merely upbraided and threatened with 



I06 THE LOWER SOUTH 

punishment, and not even beaten to his knees, 
and if he yet fall a-whimpering, and promise to 
mend his ways because he must, fails to command 
even our aspect. On the contrary, none of us but 
in his secret soul will admire him more if he go 
on with the strong hand, if he run his course out, 
if he fight his fight to a finish, and then turn his 
face to the wall and die, and give no sign. 

Such was, in fact, the course which the Southern 
leaders took after the failure of the Kansas-Ne- 
braska scheme and the rise of the Republican 
party. At the time the Kansas-Nebraska Bill 
passed, Yancey and the secessionists were reduced 
to a handful. Several Southern states had been 
carried by the Union men on platforms declaring 
not merely that there was no occasion to secede, 
but that there was no right in a state to secede 
on any occasion. That was in the platform of 
the Union men in Alabama in 185 1. But when 
it grew clearer and clearer that slave labor could 
not compete on equal terms with free labor, and 
that unless something further were done Kansas 
and the Middle West, like California, were sure to 
come ii^to the Union as free states, the Southern 
extremists grew stronger and stronger. Seizing 
upon the Southern wing of the Democratic party. 



' THE LOWER SOUTH 10^ 

they committed it to the extreme platform which 
the whole party had rejected in 1848. Congress 
must not only give slave labor a free chance in 
the territories, it must protect it there against the 
acts of territorial legislatures and any other expres- 
sion of the settlers' desire to get rid of it. 

The theory of secession became at once the 
uppermost topic of discussion in every one of the 
Cotton states. It was discussed in conventions, in 
joint debates, on the streets of the country towns, 
at every dinner-table. Up to 1850, probably not 
one man in a hundred anywhere in the Union 
outside of South Carolina really knew whether 
he believed in the right of secession or not, any 
more than we ourselves, before the battle of 
Manila, knew whether we believed in imperialism 
or not. The question had not been practical any- 
where but in South Carolina since the Hartford 
Convention of 18 14. But by 1860^ a majority of 
the people of the lower South had made up their 
minds that they did believe in the right, and a ma- 
jority, though not a great majority, were ready to 
exercise it if they could not get what they held to 
be their rights in the territories and if they could not 
force Northern communities to live up to the letter 
of the bond and give back their fugitive slaves. 



I08 THE LOWER SOUTH 

The men of the lower South formulated their 
demands at the Democratic National Convention 
at Charleston, and when the Northern majority 
declined by a few votes to yield them all they 
asked, they arose and followed Yancey, their 
spokesman, out of the hall and out of the party. 
Meeting again at Baltimore, they defiantly named 
a Southern man on the extreme Southern platform, 
and the entire lower South cast its votes for him. 
Lincoln, elected but not yet in office, made haste 
to let them know that he would never interfere 
with slavery and the plantation system in the 
states where they already existed. But they had 
learned too well the real hope in his mind, they 
believed too thoroughly in his own saying that a 
house divided against itself could not stand. One 
by one, the states of the lower South held their 
solemn conventions. The Union men in every 
one of them made a brave last stand with their 
backs to the wall. The congressmen at Wash- 
ington, the men who for so many years, with 
a bare equality in one house, a minority in the 
other, had initiated, passed, or prevented legisla- 
tion, haughtily retired from their places and 
hastened to Montgomery. So perfect was the 
unanimity and solidarity of the people behind 



^THE LOWER SOUTH 109 

them, after the last fight for the Union had been 
lost, that within less than a hundred days from 
the election which marked the end of their ascen- 
dency at Washington they were seated in the 
provisional congress of a new government, dividing 
among themselves its cabinet portfolios, choosing 
a president from their number, and sending envoys 
to Washington, to England, to Europe. Prohibit- 
ing the foreign slave trade, they thereby sum- 
moned Virginia to choose between the Union her 
great sons had builded and the civilization which 
had its birth on her shores. That summons fail- 
ing, they fired on Sumter, and the cannonade at 
last awoke the mother of States and forced her 
to make her choice at once. 

Our history has many dramatic episodes in 
which men and women play the parts. Here, 
however, was the supremely dramatic moment in 
the development of the silent forces on the great 
stage where states, not men, are the players. 
When Virginia roused herself from her trance of 
forty years, she awoke to such a conflict of high 
motives and passionate impulses, to be beat upon 
by such stormy appeals, to be torn with such 
contrary aspirations, as no tragedy queen on any 
mimic stage ever was beset with. The imperial 



no THE LOWER SOUTH 

commonwealth had fallen on that sleep weakened 
with the pain of bearing states, and wearied out 
with the toil of setting in order the spacious 
mansion which should shelter them. Now, the 
instinct of motherhood called her one way, the 
safety of the household another. If she turned 
to Massachusetts, once her steadfast ally, no 
Adams or Hancock answered her. No Henry, 
no Marshall, no grave-eyed Washington was there 
to step between her and her fighting soul. She 
took hurried counsel, and pleaded for time, and 
muttered somewhat of old sacrifices made, old 
victories won. Her mountain parts chose liberty 
and the new order, her comfortable lowlands clung 
to the old. While she still hesitated, and only 
half consented, her unruly children were already 
compassing her about with armies, ranging their 
battle line along her northern border, thrusting 
the sword into her reluctant hand, pressing an 
unsought crown upon her brow. Even Massa- 
chusetts, mother of the hardier brood, may not 
judge her harshly if at last her motherhood 
yielded to that insistent clamor about her knees. 
The cause Virginia thus took up was no longer 
her own. The only trophies she could win were 
monuments. And yet, we may not altogether con- 



THE LOWER SOUTH III 

demn the cause, or the true leaders in it, or the 
civilization they fought for. In attempting so 
broad a view of it and them, I have not been 
unaware of the dangers inseparable from such a 
method. Inaccuracy, which minute inquiries 
have to risk, is less harmful than folly, unfairness, 
unwisdom, against which one who attempts large 
views must guard. But the more liberal method, 
if it endanger us of greater error, may also win 
us more enlightenment than the other. It is only 
by drawing a wide circle that we can see what 
that lost cause really was. It was not the cause 
merely of a single institution or of a particular 
theory of government. The power which ruled 
the Union forty years and then tore it asunder 
was based on history, it was rooted in human 
nature, it was buttressed by ancient law and 
usage. It caught hold of our new continent, and 
made headway against our new ideas, because 
it found certain material conditions peculiarly 
adapted to sustain it. Good men and bad men 
were its instruments, but it did not radically 
change the quality either of the men whom it 
lifted up or of the men whom it bowed down. 

No American nowadays needs to be told how 
dangerous to our American experiment that old 



112 THE LOWER SOUTH 

Southern civilization was. Nevertheless, he is 
but half an American who can find no charm in it. 
The only apology for it is the men it bred, and 
how strong they were I have tried to indicate. 
But the best test of them came at the end, when 
they fought a losing fight as well as they ever 
fought a winning one ; when they put into the 
field the very best army their race ever marshalled 
in any cause, on any continent ; when Virginia, 
from her marvellous county of Westmoreland, 
brought forth and set at its head yet another 
captain, greater than any Marlborough or Wel- 
lington of them all. If we content ourselves with 
calling that army a band of rebels, and Lee a 
traitor, we are in danger of glorifying rebellion ; 
we make "traitor" meaningless. If they broke 
faith with the new order, it was to keep faith with 
the old. For it was their whole past, it was the 
whole past of the race, that surged up the Gettys- 
burg heights, — and the whole future stood embat- 
tled to withstand the shock. It is enough if such 
as come up out of the desert — out of the vineyard 
turned into a desert, and sown with the dragon's 
teeth — if even they can rejoice that then, as 
always, the angels of the future were stronger 
than the angels of the past. 



11. THE ORATOR OF SECESSION 



II 

THE ORATOR OF SECESSION 

A STUDY OF AN AGITATOR 

In the study of American history, we seem to 
have attained a sufficient remoteness from the great 
antislavery agitators to justify confidence in the 
estimates of them and their work which historians 
like Mr. Rhodes and Mr. Schouler have been mak- 
ing for us. In these fresh and careful accounts 
of the great sectional controversy, Garrison and 
Phillips take their place close alongside the men 
of action who carried on the fight in Congress, in 
the White House, and on the battlefield. It is, 
therefore, somewhat surprising that the proslavery 
agitators are generally neglected by the historians 
of their times. The congressional side of the 
proslavery fight has been adequately portrayed, 
and some attention has been given to the govern- 
ors and other officials in the South who were 
active champions of the doomed institution. But 
of the proslavery agitators, properly so called, 
we know very little. Even Mr. Rhodes, whose 
. "5 



Il6 THE ORATOR OF SECESSION 

account of Southern society exhibits so conscien- 
tious a desire to understand the springs of the 
secession movement, has told us far less than 
we should like to know of them, and particularly 
of the man who was foremost in that work. 

The fact is not explained by any lack of striking 
and picturesque features in the man's career, for 
it was in many ways extraordinary ; nor can it be 
attributed to the failure of his enterprise, for 
he and his fellows accomplished their immediate 
purpose. They may at least share equally with 
Garrison and Phillips and their associates in the 
responsibihty for precipitating the conflict at one 
time instead of another, and for the lines on 
which the issue was finally joined. Yet for 
chapters on the work of the antislavery agi- 
tators — work that began and ended with agita- 
tion — one finds scarcely a line devoted to the 
life-work of William Lowndes Yancey. An in- 
dustrious biographer^ has indeed published a mass 
of interesting facts about his life and times, but 
the book, though favorably known to investigators, 
has made little headway toward reestablishing his 
fame. His very name, which in the later fifties 
was a rallying cry to the defenders of slavery, and 

1 John Witherspoon Du Bose. 



THE ORATOR OF SECESSION WJ 

to its assailants an execration, is known to few 
who cannot go back in memory to those terrible 
years. Thousands of youth, fresh from the study 
of their country's history even in our best col- 
leges, would be astounded, no doubt, to hear a 
claim advanced for him, as it might be, and quite 
seriously, to a place among the half-dozen men 
who have had most to do with shaping American 
history in this century. A pause over his grave 
should not prove useless to those who are attempt- 
ing a philosophical treatment of the period to 
which he belongs. 

He was of good Virginian ancestry, but his 
father, Benjamin Cudworth Yancey, lived in 
South Carolina, and was numbered with Lowndes, 
Cheves, Calhoun, and Wilds, in the so-called 
"legal galaxy" of the Palmetto State. The father 
died in 1817, when the son was three years old, 
and left but a small fortune ; the boy's education 
was therefore limited to a single year at Williams 
College. After that, he studied law at Green- 
ville, South Carolina, and at twenty he was a prac- 
titioner at the bar, the editor of a Unionist paper, 
and an anti-nullification orator. At twenty-one, 
he married a wealthy lady and became a planter. 
A year later, he went with his slaves to Alabama 



Il8 THE ORATOR OF SECESSION 

and established himself at Oakland, a plantation 
in the heart of the Black Belt, near Cahawba, the 
first capital of the young commonwealth, — a city 
of sudden birth and swift decay, now quite van- 
ished from the earth. 

Here he lived the quiet life of a cotton 
planter until an irretrievable disaster, the acci- 
dental poisoning of his slaves, drove him back 
into law and journalism ; and journalism and the 
law led him into politics. Meanwhile, the head- 
ship of a slave establishment had so strengthened 
the ties which bound him to his class and his 
section that no trace of Unionism was left in 
his mind when he entered the campaign of 1840 
as a Van Buren man. Alabama was Democratic, 
but the Whigs were making a wonderful canvass. 
The demand for state rights oratory was great, and 
it was as a state rights Democrat of the strictest 
sect that Yancey first appeared, in the hard-cider 
year, before Alabama audiences. His success was 
such that for twenty years thereafter his sway over 
the people of the state was comparable to nothing 
that we of a cooler-headed generation have ever 
seen. Chief Justice Stone, a jurist not unknown 
to lawyers of the present day, once said: "I 
first heard Mr. Yancey in 1840. I thought then, 



THE ORATOR OF SECESSION II9 

and I yet think, he was the greatest orator I ever 
heard." 

He rose rapidly to power. At twenty-seven, he 
was in the lower house of the legislature. At 
twenty-nine, he was a state senator. At thirty, 
a by-election sent him to Congress. His reputa- 
tion as an orator had preceded him, and his first 
speech at Washington extended it widely, while 
the immediate consequences of the speech made 
him for a time a national celebrity. Clingman, 
of North Carolina, had become a target for South- 
ern invective when he opposed the annexation of 
Texas, the principal measure under debate dur- 
ing the winter of 1844-45. To Yancey, though 
a new member, his fellows granted the distin- 
guished privilege of replying for them all ; and if 
he excelled in one sort of oratory more than 
another it was in impassioned invective. His 
speech made a pronounced impression on the 
House and the country, and Clingman, stung to 
the quick, demanded an explanation of certain 
personal allusions. Yancey haughtily declined 
to explain. Clingman then asked for **the satis- 
faction usual among gentlemen"; and with this 
demand his opponent, who had killed his man in 
an earlier affair, instantly complied. 



120 THE ORATOR OF SECESSION 

The meeting was bloodless, and the opponents 
of dueling failed entirely in their efforts to make 
an example of the principals. Preston King's 
resolution for an investigation was beaten in the 
House, and the legislature of Alabama passed, 
over the governor's veto, an act relieving Yancey 
of the political disabilities which, under the laws of 
the state, he had incurred. To the Alabama Bap- 
tist, a religious paper which severely censured his 
course, Yancey wrote : " The laws of God, the laws 
of my own state, the solemn obligations due 'that 
young wife, the mother of my children,' to whom 
you so feelingly and chastely allude, were all con- 
sidered ; but all yielded, as they have ever done 
from the earliest times to the present, to those 
laws which public opinion has framed, and which 
no one, however exalted his station, violates with 
impunity." It was a poor defence, but Alexander 
Hamilton's was little better. 

Unopposed by the Whigs, Yancey was returned 
for the term beginning in 1845, and his reputation 
was much strengthened by his speeches during 
the first session. Apparently, he had every reason 
to look forward to a brilliant career in public life. 
But at the end of the session he resigned his seat, 
formed a partnership with a distinguished lawyer 



THE ORATOR OF SECESSION 121 

of Montgomery, and stated with the utmost clear- 
ness his reasons for retiring. He never again 
held office under the government of the United 
States. I have set down the facts of his career 
up to this point as briefly as I could, for the 
reason that his true life-work began with his with- 
drawal from Congress. 

The address to his constituents in which he 
announced his retirement was in the main a bitter 
arraignment of the Northern Democrats. He 
charged them with subserviency to sectional in- 
terests antagonistic to the welfare of the South, 
and with infidelity to the party's historical prin- 
ciples. "If principle," he declared, "is dearer 
than mere party association, we will never again 
meet in common Democratic convention a large 
body of men who have vigorously opposed us on 
principle." The scorn of compromise was the 
key-note of his address ; resistance to compromise 
was the sum total of the endeavor to which he 
thus committed himself. The recreant party 
must be brought back to the principles of strict 
construction or no longer leaned upon as the bul- 
wark of Southern rights. The South must cease 
to rely on party, and insist, regardless of party 
platforms and party interests, upon all it had a 



122 THE ORATOR OF SECESSION 

right to claim under the "compact of union." 
The ultimate remedy for Northern aggression he 
did not yet name; but when occasion arose, in 
the controversy over the territory acquired from 
Mexico, he named it promptly and clearly. It 
was not nullification, or interposition, or any other 
form of resistance inside the Union ; it was seces- 
sion from the Union. To the fight against compro- 
mise Yancey gave the remainder of his life. To 
understand how he fought and why he won, it is 
necessary to have some knowledge of the people 
among whom he lived and the means of agitation 
that were available. 

Politically, the people of the Cotton states were 
divided into three parties. There were, indeed, 
few who did not call themselves either Whigs or 
Democrats ; but the extreme state rights men, 
though they usually cooperated with the Demo- 
crats, repeatedly asserted themselves in such a 
way as to present the aspect of a third party. 
Although a majority of the great planters were 
probably Whigs in name, they usually stood for 
the interests of their class, and in consequence 
they frequently found themselves in closer accord 
with the state rights or " Southern Rights " Demo- 
crats of their own section than with the Whigs of 



THE ORATOR OF SECESSION 123 

the North. On the other hand, the bulk of the 
Democrats, small farmers, tradesmen, and the like 
were nowhere committed, except in South Caro- 
lina, to the extreme doctrines of Calhoun and 
other leaders in the resistance to centralization. 
There is no good reason to believe that either 
nullification or secession, considered as a policy, 
had a majority of the party in any state except 
South Carolina; and in South Carolina the Cal- 
houn men controlled so completely that the ordi- 
nary party divisions can hardly be said to have 
prevailed there at all. It was to the state rights 
men, mingled as they were with the supporters of 
both the great national parties, that Yancey turned 
for help in the task he had undertaken. 

It may be said, however, that the public mind 
of the entire South was in a state altogether 
favorable to revolutionary enterprises. A growing 
unrest was in many ways apparent. Industrial 
unrest, due to economic causes, was exhibited in 
a revival of the migratory impulse. Early in the 
fifties, we find Senator C. C. Clay complaining 
bitterly of the abandonment of lands near his 
home in the fertile valley of the Tennessee. Olm- 
sted's books are full of allusions to the westward 
movement of cotton growers, even from regions so 



124 ^-^^ ORATOR OF SECESSION 

recently settled as the valleys of the Alabama and 
Tombigbee rivers. It was about this time that 
the failure of the state bank systems throughout 
the South was finally accepted by the legislatures 
and the people. The political signs of unrest were 
unmistakable. In Yancey's own state, party lines 
were drawn in so many ways during the decade 
from 1845 to 1855 that the party names are be- 
wildering. Whigs and Democrats, Bank men and 
Anti-Bank men. Unionists and Southern Rights 
men. Know-nothings and Anti-Know-nothings 
sought the favor of the people. At such a time, 
tenacity of purpose counted. In the midst of hesi- 
tatiop and indecision, Yancey had the immense 
advantage of knowing his own mind. 

He had another advantage in that he lived 
among a people peculiarly incapable of resisting 
any appeal that might be made to them as his 
was, — a people over whom the power of a real 
orator was incalculable. An editor like Garrison, 
a poet like Whittier or Lowell, a novelist like 
Mrs. Stowe, could hardly have swayed the planters 
of Alabama as they swayed the people of New 
England ; for it must be said of the lower South 
that its culture was not of books. Mr. Rhodes, 
guided by the testimony of European travellers, 



THE ORATOR OF SECESSION 1 25 

has reached the conclusion that the best society 
in the South was finer than in the North. "The 
palm," he declares, " must be awarded to the slave- 
holding section." But the qualities that made the 
Southern host so attractive to the travelled Eng- 
lishman or Frenchman were not developed in an 
atmosphere of free libraries or free public schools. 
There were really no public libraries in the Cotton 
states, and the public school system did not flourish 
in a region so sparsely settled and so devoted to 
agriculture. The literary activity which gave to the 
world such new names as Hawthorne and Emerson 
had in no wise stirred the lower South. Certain 
newspapers, like those of Charleston and New 
Orleans and the Montgomery Advertiser^ were 
edited with ability, and were by no means unim- 
portant forces in politics. Indeed, if one gives 
due weight to the fewness of cities, the influence 
of the newspaper press seems to have been 
fully as great as one could expect. But it was 
the spoken word, not the printed page, that 
guided thought, aroused enthusiasm, made his- 
tory. It is doubtful if there ever has been a 
society in which the orator counted for more 
than he did in the Cotton Kingdom. 

Yet at first blush it would seem that, as com- 



126 THE ORATOR OF SECESSION 

pared with the lyceum orator of New England, 
the oratorical agitator in the lower South had 
serious obstacles to contend with. He had, 
indeed, no such machinery as the lyceum to 
bring him before his audiences. Moreover, the 
railroads were few and short; there were no 
great cities and few important towns. But he 
did not need the device of the lyceum to get an 
audience. Its place was amply filled by the law 
courts, the political meetings and conventions, 
the camp-meetings, and the barbecues. For, 
from the nature of their chief industry, the 
people were unemployed during certain seasons ; 
and they were all familiar with the uses of 
horseflesh. Time was often heavy on their hands, 
and everybody rode and drove. The cross-roads 
church stood often quite out of sight of human 
habitations, but its pews were apt to be well 
filled on Sunday, and the branches of the trees 
in front of it were worn with bridles. The 
court-house, marking the county seat, might have 
no other neighbors than a "general" store and 
a wretched inn ; but when some famous lawyer 
rose to defend a notorious criminal, hundreds, 
even thousands, followed with flashing or tearful 
eyes the dramatic action which surely accom- 



THE ORATOR OF SECESSION 



127 



panied his appeal. An important convention 
was not without a "gallery" because it was 
held in a town of few inhabitants and the mean- 
est hotel accommodations. As to the barbecues 
and camp-meetings, they were nothing less than 
outpourings of the people. At Indian Springs, 
in Georgia, during the hard-cider campaign, there 
was given a barbecue to which "the whole 
people of all Georgia " were invited. It was 
attended by thousands ; the orators, of whom 
Yancey was one, spoke by day and by night ; and 
it lasted a week. 

These, in fact, were the true universities of 
the lower South, — the law courts, and the great 
religious and political gatherings ; as truly as a 
grove was the university of Athens, or a church, 
with its sculpture and paintings, the Bible of a 
mediaeval town. The man who wished to lead 
or to teach must be able to speak. He could 
not touch the artistic sense of the people with 
pictures or statues or verses or plays ; he must 
charm them with voice and gesture. There 
could be no hiding of the personality, no bury- 
ing of the man in his art or his mission. The 
powerful man was above all a person ; his power 
was himself. How such a great man mounted 



128 THE ORATOR OF SECESSION 

the rostrum, with what demeanor he endured 
an interruption, with what gesture he silenced 
a murmur, — such things were remembered and 
talked about when his reasoning was perhaps 
forgotten. 

Nor can it be said that the convictions thus 
implanted were less deep and lasting than if they 
had resulted, as in other communities, from 
appeals addressed more especially to the intel- 
lect. The peculiarly impressionable character of 
Southern audiences of that day, their quick 
responsiveness to any plea that graced itself 
with the devices of the one art they loved, 
might very well have led a cool-headed observer 
to measure the outcome by the criterion of 
Latin-American civilization. Instability, lightness, 
might with reason have been attributed to such a 
people. But whatever changes had come over the 
temper of the English stock in the Cotton states, 
it had never lost its habit of fidelity to the cause 
once espoused, its sternly practical way of turn- 
ing words into deeds. What many a Northern 
optimist considered mere bluster in the fifties 
took on the horrid front of war in the sixties ; 
what seemed credulity in the farmer audiences 
who merely listened and shouted rose into the 



THE ORATOR OF SECESSION 129 

dignity of faith in the Petersburg trenches. He 
who cannot reconcile excitability with strength 
of purpose can never understand the people to 
whom Yancey spoke. ^ 

Nowhere were these characteristics of the 
men of the lower South more strongly marked 
than in Yancey's own home and the region of 
which it was the centre. The country wagons 
that always filled the main square of the Ala- 
bama capital brought every day the two most 
forcible illustrations of his contention. The 
cotton bale was his object-lesson when he sought 
to quicken his people's sense of the interests 
which were endangered when the manufacturing 
states controlled at Washington. The negro on 
top of it was a constant reminder of mastery, a 
constant incitement to a heightened appreciation 
of the liberty that was still, as in Burke's day, 
not only an enjoyment, but a kind of rank and 

1 Even so perspicacious a Northern man as Lowell, on the very 
eve of the election in i860, was assuring his countrymen that the 
Union was not in danger. " Mr. W. L. Yancey, to be sure, 
threatens to secede ; but the country can get along without him, 
and we wish him a prosperous career in foreign parts. . . . That 
gentleman's throwing a solitary somerset will hardly turn the 
continent head over heels." How grimly history glozes that 
ridicule ! 



130 THE ORATOR OF SECESSION 

privilege. To the Southerner, liberty meant noth- 
ing less than the right of himself and his com- 
munity to be free from all interference by the 
peculiar outside world which had neither cotton 
nor slaves, — the meddlesome outside world 
which kept prating of a higher law, above the 
Constitution, above the Scriptures, rolling its /s 
the while in such a disagreeable way. 

It was not, however, after the fashion of the 
common demagogue that Yancey sought to lead 
his people. His claim to our respect as a polit- 
ical thinker is far stronger than that. He did 
not show them merely the obvious aspects of 
the sectional controversy. On the contrary, it 
is doubtful if any mind in the country dwelt 
more fixedly than his on the relations of the 
South to the rest of the Union, and of slavery 
to American civilization ; or if any more re- 
morselessly pursued the facts, from one point 
of view, to their remoter consequences and sig- 
nificance. In this regard, Yancey was no un- 
worthy successor to Calhoun. He was never 
clamorous or shrill, however vehement he grew, 
because no particular exigency ever drew his 
attention from the main question. Perceiving 
from the outset that the crucial test of strength 



THE ORATOR OF SECESSION 131 

between slavery and its assailants must come in 
dealing with the territories, he took his stand on 
that question, and never changed it. 

His first effort was to bring his party to his 
position ; and his position was first clearly stated 
in a political document once famous as the 
"Alabama platform" of 1848. To the Alabama 
Democratic convention of that year, called to 
choose delegates to the national convention, 
Yancey went as a delegate, carrying this docu- 
ment in his pocket. The committee on resolu- 
tions brought in a much milder declaration, but 
by a notable oratorical triumph he got his own 
views adopted instead. Following the line of 
Calhoun's resolutions of 1847, the platform de- 
clared that it was the duty of Congress not 
merely to permit slavery in the territories ac- 
quired from Mexico, but to protect it there. 
The most important clause was a denunciation 
of the new theory of squatter sovereignty, — 
a theory which Yancey always regarded as the 
most insidious of all attacks on the equality of 
the Southern states in the Union. The resolu- 
tion on this doctrine became the true gospel of 
the fire-eaters. It read as follows : — 

" Resolved, That the opinion advanced or main- 



132 THE ORATOR OF SECESSION 

tained by some that the people of a territory 
acquired by the common toil, suffering, blood, 
and treasure of the people of all the states can, 
in other event than the forming of a state con- 
stitution, preparatory to admittance as a state 
in the Union, lawfully or constitutionally pre- 
vent any citizen of any such state from remov- 
ing to or settling in such territory with his 
property, be it slave property or other, is a 
restriction as indefensible in principle as if such 
restriction were imposed by Congress." 

The delegates pledged themselves to support 
no candidate for the presidency who would not 
openly oppose both methods of excluding slavery 
from the territories — by the action of Congress, 
and by the action of territorial legislatures. The 
delegates to the national convention at Baltimore, 
with Yancey at their head, were instructed to 
act in accordance with the resolutions. With 
Democrats elsewhere who would not accept the 
resolutions as good party doctrine the Alabama 
Democrats would have no fellowship. Yancey 
immediately wrote to the various aspirants for 
the presidential nomination for an expression of 
their views, in order that he and his associates 
might be governed by their replies. 



THE ORATOR OF SECESSION 1 33 

This was the most advanced stand that any 
party convention had yet taken in the controversy ; 
but for a moment it looked as if the whole of 
the Southern democracy were going to take it at 
once. The Alabama platform had done for the 
proslavery agitation what the Virginia and Ken- 
tucky resolutions, at the close of the eighteenth 
century, did for the Anti-Federalist impulse. 
Democratic conventions in Florida and Virginia 
hastened to adopt it; the legislatures of Georgia 
and Alabama indorsed it. Then suddenly it fell 
into disfavor. Moderate men who loved the 
Union saw in it danger to the country's peace ; 
politicians, looking forward to the campaign, 
scented danger to the party. Yancey returned 
from a circuit of the courts to find the news- 
papers turning against him, the presidential 
aspirants replying evasively to his letters, and 
even his fellow-delegates wavering. He himself 
did not waver for an instant. At Baltimore, he 
spoke firmly, first objecting to the nomination 
of a candidate until a platform should be agreed 
on, and then urging his views in a minority 
report from the committee on resolutions. His 
amendment being rejected, and Cass, the reputed 
author of the squatter sovereignty doctrine, being 



134 THE ORATOR OF SECESSION 

named as the candidate, he arose, and with a 
single follower left the hall. 

The situation when he returned to his home 
was an admirable one to try the temper of an 
agitator. The people crowded to hear him 
defend his course ; at one meeting after another 
the Democrats urged him in affectionate terms 
to reconsider his purpose and yield to the will 
of the majority. But he had the born agita- 
tor's inability to accept defeat. He declined 
to support Cass, or in any way to recede from 
his position. On the contrary, he denounced 
with the utmost bitterness the course of his 
fellow-delegates at Baltimore. He would come 
back into the party when it abandoned squatter 
sovereignty, and not before. Alabama cast her 
electoral votes for Cass and Butler, and his 
labors seemed to have gone for nothing. He 
had failed in his attempt at party leadership. 
But one thing was left to him : his prestige 
as an orator always sufficed to get him a hear- 
ing. On one occasion, a public meeting first 
voted that he should not be heard, and then, 
when it was announced that he would speak on 
the other side of the street, adjourned thither 
en masse without the formality of a vote. 



THE ORATOR OF SECESSION 1 35 

He kept on speaking, and before long the 
crisis of 1849-50 gave him another opening. 
As the time for the decision of the territorial 
question approached, party lines in the Cotton 
states grew weaker and weaker. Democrats who 
feared for the Union favored a compromise ; 
many Whigs, moved by their attachment to 
slavery and the plantation system, favored a 
firm stand for the Southern contention. Yancey 
found himself in the forefront of the opposition 
to Clay's plan for saving the Union. He be- 
lieved that the rights of the Southern states 
had been sacrificed in the compromise of 1820. 
To accept another arrangement that would hin- 
der the extension of slavery was to his mind like 
submitting to a second branding. The honor 
of the South was at stake, not its material 
interests alone. With this appeal he won many 
to his side ; it played upon the instinct that had 
kept the duello alive. He even found his way 
back into the councils of the Democratic party. 
That party, in fact, seemed on the eve of dis- 
ruption throughout the South. Union men and 
Southern Rights men were struggling for the 
mastery in the organization. The people were 
really dividing, with little regard to parties, on 



136 THE ORATOR OF SECESSION 

the issue of compromise or resistance, and the 
Whigs were for the most part joining the 
Union Democrats. For the first time, there was 
a clear division in Yancey's own state between 
those who thought the plantation system safe 
inside the Union and those who were ready to 
weigh the peculiar interests and the honor of 
the South against the value of the Union. 

In consequence, Yancey came face to face 
with men who opposed his leadership not be- 
cause it endangered the welfare of a party, but 
because his ideas were a menace to the Union 
and they loved it. The defence of compromise, 
which in that exigency was the defence of the 
Union, was undertaken by men of no ordinary 
ability. In Alabama, Henry W. Hilliard, a Whig 
of national reputation in those days, and an 
orator hardly second to Yancey himself in effec- 
tiveness with popular audiences, was the Union 
leader. Senator William R. King, who was soon 
to die while the Vice-President's seat awaited 
him, counselled moderation and loyalty. Collier, 
the governor. Watts, who was to be governor and 
a member of the Confederate cabinet, Houston, 
who after many years was to lead his people 
out of the horrors of reconstruction, — were 



THE ORATOR OF SECESSION 137 

all firm Unionists. It was men like these in 
Alabama and the neighboring states who kept 
the Nashville convention from doing any mischief. 
It was they who gave Yancey, now at the head 
of the Southern Rights party, his second defeat. 
Their fight drew eloquent praise from Rufus 
Choate at the time, but nowadays it is hardly re- 
membered that there ever was any fight for the 
Union in the lower South. They were successful 
in most of the congressional districts, and the 
party of resistance practically disappeared. But 
Yancey, with a corporal's guard of followers, re- 
fused to leave the field. In 1852, a national 
ticket, Troup and Quitman, was actually nomi- 
nated and supported by a few thousands who 
stood in the South, as a like handful of steadfast 
abolitionists did in the North, for the view that 
the inevitable conflict was at hand. Yancey, in 
fact, never considered any other provocation com- 
parable to the measures of 1850. In i860, he 
declared that if he went out of the Union because 
of "a Black Republican victory," he would go 
"in the wake of an inferior issue" ; the true justi- 
fication for such action, in his mind, was that 
the Union had been destroyed ten years before, 
when the Southern states were denied equality 



138 THE ORATOR OF SECESSION 

with the free states of the North in the common 
territorial possessions. 

But it was clear that the secessionists were 
in a minority. Yancey had failed as the leader 
of a separate party movement, as he had failed 
before to win leadership in the old party. He and 
his associates in the South were in like case with 
Garrison and other extremists in the North. 
His power waned again, but his fame was con- 
stantly growing. It did not proceed from above 
downward, like the oratorical reputations of the 
office-holders at Washington, but spread in an 
ever widening circle among the people themselves, 
until it pervaded states where his voice had not 
yet been heard. His figure was now distinct and 
threatening far beyond the limits of his immediate 
personal influence. He had become the orator 
of secession, the storm centre of Southern dis- 
contents. More than that, he had made himself 
feared by moderate men everywhere as the arch- 
enemy of compromise. Now that Clay was dead, 
Stephen A. Douglas had succeeded to the leader- 
ship of those who trusted Clay's devices. In 
Douglas, and Northern men like him, Yancey saw 
the constant obstacle in his path to leadership in 
the South, for it was they who were forever be- 



THE ORATOR OF SECESSION 139 

gulling the South with bargains and promises. 
Douglas, on the other hand, might well have 
studied, during the truce that followed the battle 
of 1850, the man who, far more than any North- 
ern rival, threatened him with defeat alike in his 
policy and in his ambition. 

But for the moment Douglas was having his 
way. His doctrine of squatter sovereignty had 
triumphed in the compromise, and he proceeded 
now to extend it into new fields. The passage 
of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill in 1854 marked the 
lowest ebb in Yancey's political fortunes. It 
seemed to prove what his opponents at home 
had all along contended, — that slavery was safe 
in the Union ; for was not the whole great West 
thrown open to the master and the slave } In 
vain he warned his people against the delusive 
concession. His was no patient spirit, but he was 
compelled to wait for events to prove that Douglas 
was not the saviour of the South. 

Events, however, were moving rapidly. The ex- 
tremists of the North were helping the extremist 
leaders in the South. The Free-soilers of Kan- 
sas were working for them ; John Brown was their 
ally. For a moment, indeed, Yancey seems to 
have been misled by the Cincinnati platform of 



140 THE ORATOR OF SECESSION 

1856, and by Buchanan's adroitly worded letter 
of acceptance, into the belief that his triumph was 
coming in the form in which he had sought it at 
Baltimore, — within the lines of the party ; for, 
apparently thinking that the party had discarded 
the Douglas doctrine when it rejected Douglas 
as a candidate, he went into the Alabama conven- 
tion, regained his party standing, and supported 
Buchanan. But the party persisted with the 
Douglas policy in Kansas, and with the failure 
of the scheme Yancey saw the approach of his 
real triumph, — a triumph that should crush 
Douglas, who for a time had made him power- 
less, overthrow the time-servers in his party, who 
had twice overthrown him, and bring to his feet 
his own people, who had twice refused to follow 
him. 

The vision made him more impatient than 
ever. He devoted himself to the ways and means 
of hastening the consummation. In Southern 
commercial conventions he insisted with arrogance 
on the separateness of the South's industrial in- 
terests. He even denounced as unconstitutional 
the laws forbidding the foreign slave-trade, sup- 
porting his position with the most extraordinary 
reasoning in the history of constitutional inter- 



THE ORATOR OF SECESSION 141 

pretations. Finally, in 1858, he wrote, and after- 
ward defended, a note to a correspondent which 
found its way into print and became known far 
and wide as the "scarlet letter." *'No national 
party can save us," he declared; "no sectional 
party can save us. But if we could do as our 
fathers did — organize committees of safety all 
over the Cotton states (and it is only in them that 
we can look for any effective movement) — we 
shall \_sic\ fire the Southern heart, instruct the 
Southern mind, give confidence to each other, and 
at the proper moment, by one organized concerted 
action, we can precipitate the Cotton states into 
revolution." 

The Democrats of Alabama, now united on the 
platform of 1848, to which even the moderate men 
had been driven by the outcome of the squatter 
sovereignty experiment, sent Yancey to the na- 
tional convention at Charleston with practically 
the same message he had carried to Baltimore. 
About the same time, the legislature instructed 
the governor to call a convention of the people 
of the state in the event of the election of a 
"Black RepubHcan" to the presidency. Yancey 
went to Charleston assured that the whole lower 
South was behind him. Douglas, still pursuing 



142 THE ORATOR OF SECESSION 

his great ambition, saw his fate in Yancey's 
hands, and went as far to meet the fire-eaters as 
he could go without abandoning all hope of an 
effective support in the North. 

But the men of the Cotton states, knowing that 
their hour was come, would accept nothing less 
than the whole of that for which they had so long 
contended. When once again, after twelve years 
of defeat and exile, Yancey rose to speak before 
a national convention, he had such an opportunity 
as rarely comes even to an American orator. 
The imperious tones of his wonderful voice fell 
with strange power on the assembly. The 
trembling delegates hung upon his words, for 
they saw in his hands the fate, not of Douglas 
alone, but of the party, perhaps of the Union. 
If to grant his demands was party suicide, it 
was hardly less party suicide to refuse them. By 
a few votes, the Southern platform was rejected. 
He left the hall, and now, not the single follower 
of twelve years before, but the delegates of seven 
states, trooped at his heels. In the end, yet others 
followed. 

When Douglas, finally receiving the nomination 
of those who remained, went before the people, 
he found Yancey awaiting him. Declining the 



THE ORATOR OF SECESSION 1 43 

offer of the vice-presidency from the friends of 
Douglas, Yancey had joined the seceders at Balti- 
more, where he favored the nomination of Breck- 
inridge on the extreme Southern platform, and 
then entered on a canvass of the Northern states : 
a totcr de force that smacks either of overfed am- 
bition or else of a real hope that there might be 
such a union as he had always held the Consti- 
tution to define, — a union in which the will of 
the majority should count for nothing against 
the letter of the Constitution as he read it. He 
spoke in the Middle states, in New England, 
and in the West. He even spoke in Faneuil 
Hall, and silenced a threatening uproar where 
Phillips had conquered his first mob. His atti- 
tude toward his Northern audiences is perhaps 
best exhibited in his last speech on Northern 
soil, made when the result of the election was 
already clearly foreshadowed. 

" My countrymen," he said at Cincinnati, "you 
cannot carry out the policy of the Black Repub- 
lican party. You cannot carry it out, and expect 
the South to remain submissively bowing down 
to your supremacy. We are for the Union. 
What union } For the union, gentlemen, con- 
tained between these two lids" (holding up the 



144 ^^-^ ORATOR OF SECESSION 

Constitution). "... Can you obtain anything, 
gentlemen, by destroying, even if you are able, 
my section, save the memory of a great wrong 
that would haunt you through eternity .? . . . But 
do not, do not, my friends of the North, — I say 
it before you in no spirit, gentlemen, of servile 
submission to your power, or of servile acknowl- 
edgment of that power, for as God rules I have no 
fear of it, as much as I respect it, — but do not, 
merely because you have the power, do not 
wreathe your arms around the pillars of our 
liberty, and, Hke a blind Samson, pull down that 
great temple on your heads as well as ours." 

From the time he crossed the Ohio, his journey 
homeward was like a triumphal progress. At 
Nashville, the horses were taken from his carriage 
and his admirers drew it through the streets. 
At New Orleans, an informal holiday was pro- 
claimed, that all might hear him. When he 
reached Montgomery, he found Douglas just leav- 
ing the city ; that night, no hall could contain 
the multitudes thronging to hear their champion, 
whom they hailed as the foremost orator of 
the world. At last they were ready to follow 
where he led. The lower South voted for the 
candidate of his choice, and the day after the 



THE ORATOR OF SECESSION 1 45 

election lifelong opponents of his policy joined 
their voices to his and advocated the final step 
into disunion. 

But his triumph was not to be completed with- 
out a struggle. The friends of the Union in his 
own state were driven to the wall, but they 
made one more gallant fight before they yielded. 
They were still strong in northern Alabama, and 
with them were joined some who, seeing seces- 
sion inevitable, were yet disposed to wait until 
cooperation with other states could be assured, 
and others, no doubt, who were stirred by no 
higher motive than a sullen unwillingness to ac- 
cept a leadership so long rejected. The temper 
of the convention was in doubt until it assem- 
bled, and on the first test vote the majority for 
immediate secession was but eight. The spirited 
opposition roused Yancey into an arrogance which 
the Union leaders, who were wanting neither 
in ability nor in courage, answered with sturdy 
defiance. Defeated, however, in their attempt 
to get the ordinance submitted to the people, 
they for the most part yielded, in the hope that 
unanimity might give strength to the movement 
they deprecated; but no less than twenty-four 
refused to sign the instrument. The results of 



146 THE ORATOR OF SECESSION 

submitting the ordinance to the people in Texas, 
and later in Virginia, give us no reason to be- 
lieve that the decision of Alabama could have 
been changed. 

Yancey's desire was history. Suddenly, and as 
if by some enchantment, the Cotton Kingdom 
had risen to face the world. Before his eyes, 
in his own home, he saw a new government 
established, a new flag unfurled. It was fit, in- 
deed, that his should be the voice to welcome 
Jefferson Davis when he came to take his place 
at the head of the new Confederacy, for no 
other single voice had availed so much to call 
it into existence. But his work was done. He 
soon sailed away to Europe at the head of the 
commission sent to secure recognition for the 
Confederacy among the great powers. Return- 
ing from that bootless mission, he took his seat 
in the Confederate Senate, and in the turbulent 
debates of that gloomy and impotent legislature, 
his last energies were consumed. A painful 
malady had long sapped his strength, and in the 
summer of 1863 he went home to die. In the 
delirium of fever his voice sometimes rose in 
fierce commands to visionary hosts on unseen 
battlefields. But his passing was little marked. 



THE ORATOR OF SECESSION 147 

The orators had given place to the captains. His 
people were working out in blood and fire the 
destiny up to which he had led them. 

I shall not attempt an estimate of this career. 
There is the same doubt of its importance which 
attaches always to the career of a forerunner. 
Events would perhaps have taken the same course 
without him, and the silent forces would have 
worked out the inevitable if he had never raised 
his voice. Moreover, his was but one, though 
the clearest and firmest, of many eloquent voices. 
But surely it is too important a career to be 
neglected by those who write our history. Yet 
our knowledge of the man is almost entirely 
matter of tradition. He wrote no books, and 
published no collection of his speeches. The 
fragments that remain bear the marks of imper- 
fect reporting, for the most effective of his 
addresses were those delivered before popular 
audiences, usually in the open air, and they were 
not taken down. What is left could never be 
treated as literature, and conveys, indeed, but a 
vague notion of his oratory. Yet there are para- 
graphs which, read with the single purpose to esti- 
mate their immediate effect on those who heard 
them, and with due regard to time and place, 



148 THE ORATOR OF SECESSION 

impress one very strongly with liis mastery of 
the instrument he used. The sentences some- 
times rush like charging cavalry. There are 
phrases that ring out like bugle calls. It is the 
language of passionate purpose ; of an orator bent 
on rousing, convincing, overwhelming the men in 
front of him, not on meeting the requirements 
of any standard of public speech. 

Of his look and bearing we have better record, 
for it is of these things that Southern tradition 
is most careful. He had little of the poseur ahout 
him ; what most impressed men was his grim 
fixedness of purpose. He was not given to fran- 
tic gesticulation, and it is said that he rarely oc- 
cupied more than a square yard of space even in 
his longest speeches. His chief physical endow- 
ment was his voice, — *'the most perfect voice," 
one tells us, " that ever aroused a friendly audience 
to enthusiasm or curbed to silence the tumults of 
the most inimical." A youth who heard it years 
ago, and who, since then, in the course of a long 
career in Congress and in the Cabinet, has doubt- 
less encountered all the notable orators of his 
time, declares it was "sweeter, clearer, and of 
more wonderful compass and flexibility " than any 
other he ever heard. In personal appearance, 



THE ORATOR OF SECESSION 1 49 

though handsome, he was in no wise extraordi- 
nary. There was even a lack of animation in his 
ordinary aspect in his later years, and a look of 
nervous exhaustion. The mastery and pride of 
his face in the portrait in the state-house at Mont- 
gomery is sufficiently exceptional even there to 
draw upon the ill-painted canvas the eye that 
wanders among the unremembered governors and 
judges of his time. But oratory, we know, is action, 
and the truer likeness of the man is the image 
of tremendous articulate passion which abides in 
the minds of those who fell under his power half 
a century ago. 

There is so much about Yancey to suggest a 
comparison with Wendell Phillips that I have been 
constantly tempted to set the two side by side in 
my thought. Their names, indeed, were often 
coupled in the invective of the moderate men of 
those days : Yancey the " fire-eater," and Phillips 
the ''abolitionist fanatic." Their careers stand out 
in striking similarity and in equally striking con- 
trast. The similarity lay chiefly in their mental 
characteristics and methods of work ; the contrast 
was in the causes for which they stood, and the 
fates they met. 



150 THE ORATOR OF SECESSION 

It is easy to think of them as the Luther and 
the St. Ignatius of the revolt against slavery. 
But Yancey's spiritual kinship was not wholly 
with the Spaniard : in him, no less than in Phil- 
lips, there was something of the German's temper. 
The two extremists were alike in their relentless 
hostility to every form of compromise, to every 
disguise with which men sought to conceal the 
sterner aspect of affairs. If both were enthusi- 
asts, neither was a mere dreamer. The fever in 
their blood brought them, not fanciful visions, but 
a keener insight into the disorder of the body 
politic than was given to more sluggish natures. 
The oratory of both was simple and direct, be- 
cause both saw and purposed clearly. Both were 
appealing from the politicians to the people, and 
they spoke a language which the people under- 
stood, however the politicians marvelled. Both, I 
sometimes think, were wiser than their contem- 
poraries who were judging the situation by the 
standard of the ordinary, because both were alive 
to the imminence of an extraordinary crisis. 

But here the likeness ends and the contrast 
begins. The heroism which one displayed for a 
moral principle the other devoted to a political 
purpose. One fortified himself with an appeal to 



THE ORATOR OF SECESSION 15 1 

a higher law, the other with the compromises of 
the Constitution. One looked to the future for 
his justification, the other demanded of the future 
that it break not with the past. Standing thus 
for causes as opposite as the poles, they en- 
countered destinies as diverse : one, a success 
that proved the beginning of utter failure ; the 
other, defeats that are forgotten in his dateless 
triumph. 

For the surprising and neglected fact of the. 
outcome is that Yancey really led his people in 
the way he chose, while Phillips never marked 
out the path along which the Republic was finally 
to march to the heights of his. ideal. Not one 
specific design of the abolitionist extremists was 
ever accomplished in the way they planned : 
neither the breaking away of New England, nor 
the rising of the slaves under John Brown, nor 
any interference by Congress with slavery in the 
states. But in the end freedom prevailed. Yan- 
cey's definite purpose was to erect a Southern 
Confederacy, and he died under its flag. Yet 
to-day his Confederacy is a vanished dream, and 
he himself, within the lives of men who saw his 
beginning and ending, little more than a tradition. 

The traveller in New England, well acquainted 



152 THE ORATOR OF SECESSION 

with the just fame of the great abolitionist, is sur- 
prised to find among his surviving contemporaries 
an inadequate appreciation of his genius. The 
traveller in the lower South is equally astonished 
to find that a man whose name he has scarcely 
heard is honored there as the first orator of the 
century. On the gravestone of this forgotten ora- 
tor it is recorded that he was "justified in all his 
deeds " ; yet all about his grave there are so many 
graves of simple and honorable gentlemen who 
gave their lives and fortunes to the dreadful task 
he set them that one can fancy even his proud 
spirit crying out to be delivered from the body of 
that death. Nevertheless, the generous people 
who followed him have not condemned him ; nor 
may we, since he was an orator, deny him refuge 
in the defence of Demosthenes : ** Lay not the 
blame on me, if it was Philip's fortune to win the 
battle ; the end depended on the will of God, and 
not on me." 



III. THE RESOURCES OF THE 
CONFEDERACY 



Ill 

THE RESOURCES OF THE CON- 
FEDERACY 

In one of Mr. W. E. Henley's hospital poems, 
a sailor, "set at euchre on his elbow," tells in 
twenty lines what he saw from the wharf at 
Charleston when he was there off a blockade 
runner near the end of the American Civil War. 
Professor John C. Schwab, of Yale, after long 
and patient investigation of many obscure sources, 
has written a financial and industrial history of 
the South during the war which exhibits every 
characteristic of the most painstaking school of 
economic historians. His paragraphs are so meaty 
with facts, his references so abundant, his method 
so consistently scientific, his work, in a word, is so 
thoroughly well done, that it is hard to see how 
industry and intelligence could have gone farther. 

Yet it is a question whether "The Confederate 
States of America" or Mr. Henley's verses will 
prove the more serviceable to the ordinary reader, 
trying to get a notion of what was inside the shell 

155 



156 THE RESOURCES OF THE CONFEDERACY 

that crackled to pieces before the great armies of 
Grant and Sherman. Such is the complexity of 
civilized societies, so many and so artificial are the 
forms which the ordinary processes of production 
and distribution, buying and selling, borrowing 
and lending, come to take, so constantly does the 
play of human motives disarrange the machinery 
of industry and government, so wide a margin of 
error must the student allow in his observations, 
that failure in one sense is always predicable of 
an enterprise like Professor Schwab's. The work 
will of necessity be incomplete, for to reconstruct 
a civilization by setting one stone upon another 
is beyond the industry of a lifetime ; and it will 
not be rounded out by the reader himself, it is not 
supplemented by his sympathetic understanding, 
it does not stimulate his imagination. The differ- 
ence between Professor Schwab's treatment of 
the dead Confederacy and what a poet, a novelist, 
a literary historian, might do with it, is like the 
difference between an artist's and an anatomist's 
treatment of a human body. We do not judge 
the artist's work by the number or even by the 
truth of its details ; its aim is to make us see 
and understand the whole by virtue of a quality 
common to us and it. On the anatomist or the 



THE RESOURCES OF THE CONFEDERACY 1 57 

anatomist-historian our demand is different. His 
work is unfinished until the last tissue of the 
body or the body politic is dissected into its 
minutest cells. Neither anatomy nor political 
science can ever attain its object completely, as 
painting and poetry do sometimes attain theirs. 
Mr. Henley's sailor man might not more enlighten 
us if his glimpse from the wharf were widened 
into a vision of the whole harassed South. Pro- 
fessor Schwab's book will be the more valuable 
for every correction which he may make in his 
tables of prices and note-issues, for every news- 
paper file which he may in a future edition make 
a footnote to refer us to. 

But there is also a sense in which a work like 
this may be complete, — a sense in which it may 
very well pass completeness and tend to surfeit : 
that is to say, if one has regard for the reader's 
limitations. There is a point beyond which 
the writer cannot go without disregarding the 
"reader" altogether, not in the matter of his 
mere interest and pleasure, but in the matter of 
his attention and memory, of his ability to carry 
a mass of facts in his head long enough to connect 
them with what may follow. Of course, there 
are readers and readers, but it should be no 



158 THE RESOURCES OF THE CONFEDERACY 

harder to gauge the average mind in this than 
in many other of the respects in which one must 
gauge it in books and in life, and to stop short of 
the line beyond which, for the average mind, 
scarcely a single general principle or important 
relation of cause and effect will stand out through 
the haze to reward the effort which the reading of 
such a book requires. 

Of course, too, it is not the " reader " but the 
student that books Hke this are meant for. Yet 
the reader also has some claims. There are ques- 
tions which every intelligent person is moved 
to ask about the Confederacy, and here are the 
answers; but one may miss them altogether if 
the results of the investigation are set forth too 
abstrusely, or too cautiously, or too minutely. 
Professor Schwab and another scientist, Profes- 
sor E. A. Smith, of Allegheny College, — who 
limits himself, however, to a study of the Confed- 
erate treasury, — come forward from their dissec- 
tion of a defunct state, and we wish to know of 
them, not what discoveries or confirmations they 
have to report to their brother scientists, but 
what was the strength that sustained the South- 
ern Confederacy while it lived, and what disease or 
wound or weakness it died of. Perhaps it may 



THE RESOURCES OF THE CONFEDERACY 1 59 

be practicable to extract from their reports, re- 
strained as they are, and resolutely void of gossip 
and conjecture, some satisfaction of our unenlight- 
ened curiosity. 

Our question is not meant to cover the military 
struggle. With the main features of that, edu- 
cated Americans — and many Englishmen as well, 
now that they have books like Colonel Hender- 
son's "Stonewall Jackson" — are reasonably well 
acquainted. But it seems nowadays to be gener- 
ally conceded that while the armies on both sides 
were composed almost entirely of volunteers, and 
so small that the North's superiority in wealth and 
numbers had not begun to tell, the South's advan- 
tages of fighting on interior lines and of possessing 
more good riders and good shots did tell heavily. 
It would perhaps be conceded also that the South 
had men enough, if she could have kept them 
in the field well armed and well clothed and well 
fed, to withstand even the vast numbers which 
the North did put in the field and liberally equip 
and sustain. We all understand, too, that after 
the first few months the blockade forced the Con- 
federates to rely on their own resources far more 
nearly altogether than the Southern leaders in 
secession had apprehended. Were the available 



l60 THE RESOURCES OF THE CONFEDERACY 

resources inadequate, or were they neglected or 
wasted ? Why were the Southern armies always 
ill armed, ill clad, ill fed, ill paid ? How far was 
the outcome, inevitable though it may have been, 
immediately attributable to faults and errors ? 

If we disregard the already accornplished effects 
of slavery on Southern industry, it was probably 
of advantage to the Confederates that the laborers 
in their fields were as a class less easily demoral- 
ized by war than a free white peasantry would 
have been. There is nothing to indicate that, 
until the country was overrun by Union troops, 
the blacks on the farms and plantations were less 
efficient than in peace. They made no move 
to rise. It was not found necessary to exempt 
from military service more than one owner or 
overseer for every twenty slaves, and the exemp- 
tion did not keep more than five or six thousand 
men out of the army. Here was an agricultural 
labor system, defective, no doubt, but which did 
not need to be adapted to the emergency, and 
which, when it was diverted from cotton-growing 
— partly by the loss of the market for cotton, and 
partly by concerted purpose — was equal to the task 
of producing a food supply adequate to all wants, 
save that certain foods in common use, but not 



THE RESOURCES OF THE CONFEDERACY l6l 

absolutely indispensable, could not be produced 
in the South at all. For some of these, like tea 
and coffee, passable substitutes were contrived ; 
the insufficiency of salt and of various medicines 
was the difficulty most nearly insuperable. There 
was, besides, a good part of the four and a half 
million bales of cotton of the crop of i860, the 
entire four millions of the crop of 1861, the million 
or more of 1862, the half million each of 1863 and 
1864. The South had sufficient food, and it had 
in abundance a principal raw material of clothing. 
Tobacco was plentiful, — no mean item in war, 
as veterans both of the Civil War and of the 
Spanish War will testify. Tanneries were com- 
moner than any other sort of manufactories, and 
the supply of leather, though scant, could be eked 
out with various substitutes. There were vast 
resources of timber, and all the raw material for 
making iron ; contrary to the general notion, the 
great deposits of iron ore in northern Alabama 
were known before the war, and tentative attempts 
to exploit them had been made. 

But it was simply impossible to build the fur- 
naces and mills and railroads which were needed 
to make these resources fully effective. The fact 
that the manufactories and railroads were not 



1 62 THE RESOURCES OF THE CONFEDERACY 

brought up to the requisite development is in 
itself the best of reasons for believing that they 
could not have been, with the labor and the capi- 
tal that were available; for such manufactories 
as were set up, such railroads as were already- 
built, — some of them were extended with govern- 
ment aid, — were extremely profitable. The mo- 
tives of self-interest and patriotism, combined 
with the pressure of want and of military neces- 
sity, were not enough. A beginning was made 
on many lines, and in consequence there appeared 
for the first time in the Cotton states a strong 
sentiment for protection, and one heard it said 
that the blockade, like the old embargo and the 
second war with Great Britain, was going to prove 
a blessing. But four years of the most favorable 
conditions under peace would not have brought 
these industries near maturity. The machinery 
and the skilled labor could not be found under the 
actual conditions of a blockaded coast and an 
invaded border. The government itself, finding 
it impracticable to get all the small arms and 
ammunition it needed from abroad, made a head- 
way which was on the whole remarkable toward 
supplying its wants at home ; but the factories it 
established could not turn out small arms fast 



THE RESOURCES OF THE CONFEDERACY 1 63 

enough. The greater number came from United 
States arsenals seized at the outset, from cap- 
tures in battle, and from abroad. In heavy ord- 
nance, mainly through the work of the Tredegar 
Iron Works at Richmond, the domestic output 
was more considerable. President Davis, who had 
been in the old army, and Secretary of War in 
Pierce's Cabinet, could bring a valuable training 
and experience to the particular problem of arms 
and equipment, and his account of what was done 
with the means at hand shows that it was done 
intelligently and vigorously. We must admit the 
impossibility of so transforming the whole indus- 
trial system of the South as to meet the sudden 
demand for commodities which had never been 
produced there, and limit ourselves to the question 
whether the best use was made of what the Con- 
federates could produce and of their opportunities 
to buy or borrow. 

There was, first, the hope of aid from foreign 
countries, and of that cotton was naturally the 
basis. The situation was tantalizing. The price 
of cotton in England rose from the moment of 
separation, and it continued to rise until, when the 
blockade became effective, it reached a figure 
which would have enriched every planter in the 



1 64 THE RESOURCES OF THE CONFEDERACY 

Confederacy if he could have marketed his prod- 
uct. Firms and individuals who took the risks 
of running cotton through the blockade grew rich, 
notwithstanding heavy losses. Foreign concerns 
adventured in it. The government went into it 
extensively through agencies like John Frazer & 
Co., of Charleston, by sharing the risks and profits 
of private enterprise, and by establishing a bureau 
and putting four steamers of its own in commis- 
sipn. At the end of 1863, Bullock, head of the 
secret service abroad, reported that thirty-one 
thousand bales had been shipped by the govern- 
ment from the two ports of Charleston and Wil- 
mington to Liverpool. A separate bureau was 
established in Texas, and there was a lively trade 
in cotton and small arms across the Mexican line ; 
but with the fall of Vicksburg the Federal mas- 
tery of the line of the Mississippi materially les- 
sened the practical value of government assets in 
that quarter. The suggestion that the govern- 
ment might at the very outset have got posses- 
sion of all the cotton in the country, shipped it 
abroad, made it a basis of credit with foreign 
governments and financiers, and grown rich with 
its rise in value, has often been made, but is 
readily dismissed. The government had not 



THE RESOURCES OF THE CONFEDERACY 1 65 

the means either to buy the cotton or to trans- 
port it. 

After England, it is probable that the United 
States, of all ''foreign countries," contributed the 
most, through trade, of the things which the 
Confederates were in pressing need of. Always 
forbidden, at first sincerely opposed, then winked 
at, and finally shared in by the Confederate 
government, trade through the lines was con- 
stantly proving the strength of the commercial im- 
pulse on both sides. Cotton and tobacco slipped 
out ; salt, bacon, and other commodities came in. 
President Lincoln had and exercised the authority 
to license individuals to trade with the Confed- 
erates. The government at Richmond actually 
speculated in the notes of the United States. 

But one foreign loan was attempted, and of that 
also cotton was the basis. By a contract signed 
at Richmond in January, 1863, Erlanger & Cie., 
of Paris, underwrote at seventy-seven per cent of 
their face value Confederate bonds to the amount 
of three million pounds sterling. The interest was 
payable in specie, but the bonds were exchange- 
able at their face value for New Orleans middling 
cotton at sixpence a pound. That was little more 
than one-fourth the price of cotton abroad, and the 



1 66 THE RESOURCES OF THE CONFEDERACY 

Erlangers made a pretty penny by their venture ; 
but the government, what with the agent's profits 
and commissions, repurchases to affect the market, 
and interest paid, got little more than half the face 
value of the loan according to Professor Smith's 
calculation, less than half according to the more 
careful calculation of Professor Schwab. However, 
its receipts were in specie, and far larger in pro- 
portion than it realized on any but the earliest of 
its domestic loans. The single foreign loan was 
clumsily managed, and it seems clear that a larger 
one should have been tried. Possibly, the hope 
of recognition restrained the government in the 
matter, but it is reasonable to suppose that the 
enlisting of great financial interests in England 
and France would have been of more help toward 
that end than the object lesson of a few securities 
held up to prices in the European market which 
compared favorably with the quotations of United 
States bonds. However, barring some good for- 
tune which might have raised up for the Confed- 
eracy a European ally to play a part comparable 
to France's in the American Revolution, the 
shrewdest diplomacy and financiering would not 
have relieved it of the necessity to demand the 
heaviest sacrifices of its devoted people. It could 



THE RESOURCES OF THE CONFEDERACY 1 6/ 

not have drawn from without, either by trade or 
by borrowing, more than a small part of what 
it needed to keep its armies in the field. 

The devotion of the Southerners was in fact 
immeasurable ; the economic agree with the mili- 
tary historians that their sacrifices were far greater 
than any the Revolutionary patriots made. The 
first revenues of the Confederate government were 
from voluntary loans of states and free gifts of 
individuals. The first requisition on the treas- 
ury was met with the personal credit of the Secre- 
tary. In the day of extreme need, women offered 
the hair of their heads to be sold abroad for arms. 

A state of war enabled the government to get 
revenue by other extraordinary means than gifts 
and the loans of states. The United States cus- 
toms receipts at Southern ports and the bullion 
in the New Orleans mint were taken before war 
was declared. A circular issued in March, 1861, 
directed that all dues to the United States govern- 
ment be paid into the Confederate treasury. A 
law of Congress passed in May provided that all 
debts due to citizens of the United States should 
likewise be paid into the treasury, and certificates 
given in exchange. The Washington government 
retaliated with a confiscation act, and in August 



1 68 THE RESOURCES OF THE CONFEDERACY 

a Confederate act sequestrated the property of all 
alien enemies, Confederate and state bonds ex- 
empted, and set apart the proceeds to reimburse 
citizens whose property had been taken by the 
United States. Pettigru, the foremost lawyer of 
South Carolina, attacked the law as unconstitu- 
tional ; but Judge Magrath, of the Confederate 
District Court, held that the power to pass it was a 
necessary attribute of such sovereignty as the Con- 
federate government possessed — a position very 
like that which the United States Supreme Court 
came to in its last legal-tender decision. Late in 
1864, the property of renegades and emigres was 
confiscated. But the revenue from confiscations 
could not have been much above 6 millions, un- 
less we include what the states got by like meas- 
ures. It has been suggested that the entire debt 
of the South to the North at the beginning of 
the war, which is variously estimated, — Professor 
Schwab does not pretend to do more than con- 
jecture that it was about 40 millions, — should be 
counted a Confederate asset, and the same sort of 
reasoning would make the stoppage of interest pay- 
ments to Northerners on the bonds of Southern 
states and corporations an addition to the Southern 
resources. The list of extraordinary revenues 



THE RESOURCES OF THE CONFEDERACY 1 69 

should certainly include the specie of the New Or- 
leans banks, which was sent inward when the city 
fell, and taken by the government, nominally as a 
deposit. Nearly 5 millions were obtained that way. 
There remained the two ordinary sources of 
revenue, — taxation, and domestic loans. But the 
first was curtailed by the blockade to such a 
degree that the Confederate customs receipts may 
best be grouped with the receipts from gifts and 
confiscations, so trifling was the amount. One of 
the earliest laws of the provisional Congress at 
Montgomery imposed a duty of one-half of one 
cent a pound on all exports of cotton, payable in 
specie or in the coupons of the first issue of bonds, 
the interest on which was guaranteed by the tax. 
A month later, the first tariff law was passed, with 
a long free list and a rate of fifteen per cent on a 
few imports : it was thought advisable to put a 
premium on immediate importations. A small 
tonnage duty was for the sole purpose of main- 
taining lighthouses. The permanent tariff passed 
in May was of necessity a purely revenue measure, 
for the provisional Constitution, like the permanent 
one which followed, expressly forbade protection, 
although both instruments omitted the prohibition 
of export duties which is in the United States 



I/O THE RESOURCES OF THE CONFEDERACY 

Constitution — a matter of surprise to any one 
who recalls that thirty years earlier the nullifiers 
held the "tariff of abominations" to be virtually 
a tax on exports. The law followed the Walker 
principle of 1846, aiming to fix the minimum rates 
which would yield the maximum returns, made 
the rates ad valorem wherever practicable, — the 
highest twenty-five per cent, and the lowest five 
per cent, — and left the free list still long. For 
the first fiscal year, the receipts from import and 
export duties, seizures, and confiscations, all to- 
gether, were less than 2\ millions in specie. 

So taxation, to be effective, must take its most 
direct and inquisitorial form, harassing to the 
taxpayers and laborious to the collectors. That 
the government should have been loath to adopt 
so unpopular a policy is not surprising ; but that 
any government so driven upon it as that was 
should have delayed so long, and then resorted to 
it so timidly and tentatively, is explicable only on 
a low estimate of the Confederate lawmakers and 
of the Southern public opinion which their prac- 
tice of secret sessions does not seem to have 
emboldened them to disregard. But the weakness 
of the government was more culpable than the 
outcry of the people. Years of prosperity and 



THE RESOURCES OF THE CONFEDERACY I /I 

peace under the Union had wonted them to light 
burdens of taxation, and they were imbued with 
hostiUty to the whole theory of a strong central 
authority. They did, in fact, more nearly keep 
pace with their government in recognizing the 
necessity of heavy taxation than taxpayers often 
do. At one time, a considerable body of public 
opinion actually urged Congress on to its duty, 
and the clamor against the laws when they were 
passed was in large part due to the inequalities 
they contained. 

In July, 1 86 1, Secretary Memminger estimated 
at 4600 million dollars the assessable values in 
real estate, slaves, and personal property, and 
Congress, aiming to raise 25 millions, passed in 
August a direct war tax of one-half of one per 
cent on all property but government bonds 
and money on hand, making the usual exemp- 
tions. The assessment, however, fell below the 
Secretary's estimate by nearly 400 millions, and 
as a matter of fact less than one-tenth of the 
tax was ever collected from the taxpayers. It 
was not apportioned among the states, for the 
provisional Constitution made no such require- 
ment ; but each state was a tax division, and could 
obtain a rebate of ten per cent for its citizens by 



1/2 THE RESOURCES OF THE CONFEDERACY 

paying the whole of their quota, less the rebate, 
before the date fixed for collections. The result 
was that all but one or two states borrowed the 
money. The total receipts from the " tax," some 
of them not covered in for a year or more, were 
less than 20 millions in a currency already much 
depreciated. The rate was too low, and the law 
ill-framed. The taxes which the Confederacy im- 
posed during the first two years of the war were 
absurdly light in comparison with those ordinarily 
imposed by civilized states in time of peace. 

The serious resort to taxation came at the be- 
ginning of the third year, and it was all the more 
unwelcome because it was belated. In April, 
1863, the Congress passed a property tax of eight 
per cent, license taxes on various occupations, a 
graded income tax, a tax of ten per cent on the 
profits from sales of food-stuffs and a few other 
commodities, and a tax in kind, or tithe, on the 
products of agriculture. By this time, the area 
under control of the government was much dimin- 
ished, and assessable values shrunken by many 
millions. The currency was depreciating so fast 
that it put a great premium on delay in payments. 
No collections were made until the end of the 
year, and by April, 1864, but 60 millions in cur- 



THE RESOURCES OF THE CONFEDERACY 1 73 

rency, valued roughly at one-twentieth of that 
sum in specie, had been covered into the treasury. 
The next six months brought 42 millions in cur- 
rency, or 2 millions in specie. The receipts from 
the tax in kind cannot be given in terms of 
money/ Officially, the proceeds in 1863 were es- 
timated at 5 millions in currency. The next year, 
there was gathered the equivalent of 30 million 
rations. Professor Smith estimates the total re- 
turns from the tithe at 145 millions in currency. 
The trouble and expense of collection were great, 
and so was the waste. In February, 1864, the tax 
law of 1863 was reenacted with higher rates on 
property, credits, and profits : the Secretary's es- 
timate of assessable values at that -time was 3 
billions. In June, the rates were raised horizon- 
tally, and at the very end, in March, 1865, extreme 
rates were imposed. 

The law was unconstitutional, for the permanent 
Constitution required all direct taxes to be appor- 
tioned among the states according to their repre- 
sentation in Congress. Certain states held it an 
infringement of their rights, more particularly be- 
cause it taxed property which they had exempted 
and banks in which they had an interest. The 
tithe was the feature most bitterly resented, as 



174 THE RESOURCES OF THE CONFEDERACY 

inquisitorial, as imposing a special burden on agri- 
culture, already depressed by the loss of its mar- 
kets, and because the farmers could not profit by 
delay in payments, as everybody else could, but 
would lose by it instead. There were other ine- 
qualities. But the law, onerous as it was, did 
not bring the tax receipts up to a high place in 
the schedule of government revenues. The last 
full statement available, of October i, 1864, for 
the six months preceding, shows that less than 
twelve per cent of the total receipts came from 
that source. The failure to tax promptly, to tax 
skilfully and equally, and to tax heavily, was a 
damning fault and weakness of the government. 
The rival government at Washington fell into the 
same error, but recovered from it in time. 

The error is not to be measured by the inade- 
quate tax receipts alone, but by the extent to 
which it impaired and vitiated the final device of 
borrowing. Had the government adhered to the 
sound policy it began with when it passed an ex- 
port tax, payable in specie, to guarantee the inter- 
est on its first loan, it might have avoided — at 
least so long as by hook or by crook, at whatever 
cost, specie could be obtained — its unenviable 
preeminence among all modern governments as 



THE RESOURCES OF THE CONFEDERACY 1 75 

an exponent of forced loans and redundant note 
issues. Southern civilization, with sins enough 
to answer for already, might have escaped the 
crowning indictment that after centuries of money 
exchanges it brought Anglo-Saxon Americans back 
to plain barter in their market-places. 

The first loan of 15 millions was negotiated on 
a specie basis, and it was successful. The South- 
ern banks, holding perhaps 25 millions of specie, 
agreed to redeem in specie such of their notes as 
should be paid for the bonds, and for a year or 
two the interest, guaranteed by the export tax, 
was paid in specie. The second issue, in May, 
of 50 millions, was accompanied with no such 
guarantee of interest payments. Moreover, treas- 
ury notes to the amount of 20 millions were au- 
thorized by the same act, to be issued in lieu of 
bonds, and to be interchangeable with them. 
The loan was increased to 100 millions in August, 
and in December to 150 millions. The bonds 
were offered for specie, for military stores, and 
for the proceeds of the sale of raw produce or 
manufactured articles, so that the issue became 
largely a produce loan ; four hundred thousand 
bales of cotton, and tobacco and other farm prod- 
ucts in proportion, were subscribed. The relief of 



176 THE RESOURCES OF THE CONFEDERACY 

the planters was an avowed object. Through this 
policy, the government came to number four hun- 
dred and fifty thousand bales of cotton, scattered 
over the country, among its assets. The receipts 
in money from sales of bonds during the first year 
were stated to be 31 millions, or twenty-two per 
cent of the total receipts. 

The second year saw a great increase in the 
number of bonds authorized to be issued, but no 
corresponding increase in the sales. Of 165 mill- 
ions authorized in April, 3J millions were placed. 
In September, the Secretary was empowered to 
sell bonds without limit to meet appropriations. 
But only nine per cent of the total receipts of the 
year came from that source. The third year, the 
receipts from bonds rose to twenty-two per cent 
of the total, and of the 1221 millions of debt accu- 
mulated by January i, 1864, omitting the foreign 
loan, 298 millions were bonded. But the figures 
are misleading, for practically all the bond sales 
of the year, except those handled by the Erlangers, 
were in the nature of a half-compulsory funding. 
Similarly, the bond sales of the last year were 
nearly all accomplished through the compulsory 
funding act of February, 1864, which amounted 
to a repudiation of all treasury notes which should 



THE RESOURCES OF THE CONFEDERACY 1 77 

not be funded by certain dates. By the same 
act, six per cent bonds to the amount of 500 mill- 
ions were authorized for current expenses, and 
the last full statement, of October i, 1864, shows 
that but little over 14 millions of these had been 
sold. The debt was then 1371 millions, and 362 
millions of it were funded, but less than half of 
the funded debt could be called voluntary loans. 
More than half the bonds had been sold by com- 
pulsion. 

Of the enormous forced loan remaining, 178 
millions were in interest-bearing notes and cer- 
tificates, and 831 millions in notes bearing no in- 
terest. Beginning in March, 1861, wij;h an issue 
of I milHon of treasury notes bearing interest, 
following that up in May with 20 millions of notes 
bearing no interest, the government had from the 
start paid the great bulk of its expenses with notes 
of the one class or the other. By the end of the 
first year, \o^\ millions had been issued ; at the 
end of the second, the debt was 567I- millions, and 
eighty-two per cent of it was in notes. In 1863, 
new issues more than counterbalanced the reduction 
accomplished by funding, and even the repudiation 
act of February, 1864, only temporarily dimin- 
ished the rate of increase. That law required 

N 



178 THE RESOURCES OF THE CONFEDERACY 

the holders of old notes, some of them fundable 
in eight per cent bonds, either to fund them in 
four per cent bonds or exchange them for new 
notes at the rate of three for two ; otherwise, they 
were to be taxed out of existence. Perhaps 300 
millions were either funded or exchanged, but the 
remainder, though repudiated, continued to cir- 
culate. After October, 1864, current expenses 
were met mainly with treasury warrants and cer- 
tificates of indebtedness, so that an immense float- 
ing debt was piled up ; but the expiring utterance 
of the Confederate Congress was another issue of 
notes, the bill passing over the veto of President 
Davis. 

We may admit that the government could not 
have avoided forced loans and an inflated cur- 
rency, even if it had made the wisest use of all 
other means of getting revenue. Ordinary stand- 
ards of public finance cannot justly be applied to 
it. But it is hard to see how it could have chosen 
a worse policy than it did. To issue notes in 
quantities vastly beyond the demands of business, 
to repudiate them, and then to go on issuing more, 
must be near the height of bad finance. To show 
the effects of the policy completely, it would be 
necessary to examine every department of indus- 



THE RESOURCES OF THE CONFEDERACY 1 79 

try and trade — a study of great interest to econ- 
omists. Here, it is sufficient to point out that the 
redundant paper currency was the main cause of 
the government's failure to get the most possible 
out of the material resources and productive in- 
dustries of the South. 

It was intended that the notes should take the 
place of the old United States currency. The 
banks, the state governments, and the people 
readily cooperated with the government, and the 
New Orleans banks, which had been so well man- 
aged that they continued specie payments until 
September, 1861, suspended in order to accept 
the notes. But long before the end of the second 
year the circulation of these exceeded by far the 
circulation of United States money in the South in 
i860, and they rapidly depreciated. Acts to make 
them a legal tender were several times proposed, 
but none was passed. Funding acts were passed, 
but failed to attain their object. No scheme like 
Chase's system of national banks would have been 
practicable with the Confederate bonds as a basis, 
even if the particularistic public sentiment could 
have been overcome to the extent of getting the 
necessary law through the Congress. There was 
no way to regulate the currency so long as the 



l8o THE RESOURCES OF THE CONFEDERACY 

notes were issued to pay current expenses. There 
was no check on the states, which began to issue 
notes before the government. Cities, banks, cor- 
porations, business firms, individuals, swelled the 
circulation with their promises to pay ; counter- 
feiters flourished. The currency was redundant, 
unregulated, various, fluctuating ; and all the time, 
as always when there is too much money, the mass 
of the people were clamoring for more and more, 
because prices were rising higher and higher. 

By the end of 1861, a gold dollar was worth 
;^i.20 in currency; by the end of 1862, it was 
worth ^3.00 in currency ; a year later, ^20.00 ; 
before the final collapse, ^61.00 in paper was paid 
for one dollar in gold. Prices in general, with a 
few notable exceptions, as of cotton and tobacco, 
rose faster and higher than the price of gold. 
" Before the war," says a wag in Eggleston's '* Rec- 
ollections," '* I went to market with the money in 
my pocket, and brought back my purchases in a 
basket ; now I take the money in the basket, and 
bring the things home in my pocket." Of course, 
the waning of the hope of victory would have 
depreciated any sort of Confederate obligations, 
but victory itself would not have made that un- 
soundness sound. 



THE RESOURCES OF THE CONFEDERACY l8l 

The incitement to speculation was irresistible. 
The general and correct opinion was that it was 
better to hold any other sort of property than 
money. It was because notes, whether they bore 
interest or not, could be used in ordinary transac- 
tions, and for speculation, that they were preferred 
to bonds. Long-time contracts on a money basis 
were sure to prove inequitable. Salaries and 
wages were constantly shrinking. The disposition 
to economize and be frugal, in which the people had 
entered upon their time of trial, was followed by a 
reckless extravagance of the lessening little they 
had. Business was deranged, industry strangled. 
Simple-minded patriots laid the blame og the spec- 
ulators, and there arose once more the growl 
against the Jews, old as history, heard whenever 
Gentiles get into trouble over money. 

The government saw production curtailed and 
found the producers less and less minded to sell. 
It was driven to impressment and arbitrary fixa- 
tion of prices. In March, 1863, it set up boards 
of assessment, and from that time continued to 
force men to sell, at prices below those of the open 
market, for money sure to depreciate, commodities 
which they did not wish to sell at all. One result 
was to discourage industry still further. Another 



1 82 THE RESOURCES OF THE CONFEDERACY 

was waste ; for produce, seized wherever found and 
in whatever condition, often rotted or was stolen or 
lost before it reached the armies. A third was 
discontent among the people and dangerous con- 
flicts with states. A Virginia state court granted 
an injunction to restrain a Confederate official 
from impressing flour. Governor Brown, of 
Georgia, protested violently against the law, and 
the Georgia Supreme Court pronounced it uncon- 
stitutional. The feeling against it was particularly 
strong in North Carolina. Everywhere there 
was friction in enforcing it. 

In general, every strong measure of the govern- 
ment provoked resistance. North Carolina and 
Georgia were the principal centres of opposition, 
and their governors, Vance and Brown, the most 
persistent champions of extreme state rights theo- 
ries. Robert Toombs, who had been in the 
Cabinet, and Alexander H. Stephens, the Vice- 
President, spoke freely on that side. The acts 
empowering the President to suspend the writ of 
habeas corpus^ and the various conscription acts, as 
they extended the age limits and narrowed the 
exemptions, with the impressment law, were the 
measures most stoutly resisted. Brown flatly 
refused to let a conscription act be enforced in 



THE RESOURCES OF THE CONFEDERACY 1 83 

Georgia. North Carolina courts discharged con- 
scripts who had furnished substitutes, and issued 
writs of habeas corpus in a region where martial 
law had been declared. Other measures resisted 
were the calling out of the state militia, — a bone 
of contention under the old government as far 
back as the War of 1812 ; attempts at regulating 
interstate commerce ; the appointing of non-resi- 
dents to federal offices in various states ; the set- 
ting up of government distilleries contrary to state 
laws ; the taxing of state bonds ; and the effort of 
the government to share itself, and to prevent the 
states from sharing, in the profits of blockade- 
running. Before the end, the opponents of the 
government were uniting in a party, strongest in 
North Carolina, which avowed its desire for 
peace, and asserted the right, though it did not 
advocate the policy, of secession from the Con- 
federacy. 

For these troubles of the government the Con- 
federate Constitution must be held in part respon- 
sible. No government in such straits could have 
refrained from arbitrary measures, and the Confed- 
erate government could not be arbitrary, it could 
not always be trenchant and effective, without 
being unconstitutional. Most of the difficulties, 



1 84 THE RESOURCES OF THE CONFEDERACY 

however, would have been encountered if the Con- 
stitution had been a word-for-word copy — as it was 
in most of its paragraphs — of the United States 
Constitution. The variations from that model were 
not all of a nature to weaken the central authority. 
The executive was strengthened. The President's 
term was lengthened to six years. He could re- 
move the principal officers of the departments, and 
all officials of the diplomatic service, at his pleas- 
ure. He could veto specific items of an appropri- 
ation bill ; and to this power the Congress, without 
warrant from the Constitution, added the power to 
transfer appropriations from one department to 
another. The power of the legislature was limited 
by requiring a two-thirds majority in both houses 
for appropriations not based on department esti- 
mates and recommended by the President, by pro- 
hibiting extra compensation to public servants, 
and by prohibiting protection. The sovereignty 
of the states was expressly affirmed, and slavery 
guarded from all interference, but public opinion 
would have made good these provisions if they 
had been left out. The Supreme Court, though 
provided for, was never constituted, and no doubt 
the government was the weaker for want of it ; 
but that, too, was the fault of public opinion. 



THE RESOURCES OF THE CONFEDERACY 1 85 

The assertion that the Confederacy could not 
have held together in peace is insufficiently sus- 
tained if it rests on the differences between the 
Confederate Constitution and the Constitution 
of the United States. Stronger and more cen- 
tralized governments would have been better for 
the emergency on both sides, but the form which 
the Confederate government took was the only 
form it could have taken, and the only form it 
could have retained in peace. What was in effect 
a protest against the tendency of the old Union 
to become a true nation could not have bodied 
itself forth in a compact and hardy nationality. 
Unimportant as students know the m'ferits of a 
written instrument of government to be when they 
do not accord with material conditions and the 
character of the civilization to be expressed, the 
faults of the written instrument are equally un- 
important in so far as they are merely departures 
from a standard which the people cannot or will 
not live up to. 

To follow the inner workings of the Confeder- 
acy, as we are now enabled to do, will supply po- 
litical scientists and public men with striking 
instances of the effects of defying economic laws 
and disobeying the rules of sound finance. It 



l86 THE RESOURCES OF THE CONFEDERACY 

will reveal more clearly than ever the industrial 
backwardness of the South, and emphasize that 
as the most serious of its disadvantages in the 
struggle. It will credit President Davis and his 
advisers, and many other civil servants of the Con- 
federacy, with the utmost zeal and much intelli- 
gence, but none of them with great practical and 
constructive statesmanship. It will show the 
Congress at Richmond to have been a weak and 
undistinguished legislature. It will confirm com- 
pletely our feeling that the armies of the South 
were finer far than anything they defended, — that 
the wonderful gray shell was of greater worth than 
all it held. To our main inquiry, the answer is 
that the failure of the Southerners to win their 
independence, clearly as it should have been fore- 
seen, was^ in quite definite ways, immediately 
attributable to faults and errors. 

But to dwell on these faults and errors, to make 
our study wholly common-sense and scientific, may 
easily mislead us. It may lead us to neglect the 
strength, while we search out the weakness, of the 
South. It may lead us away from the moving 
spectacle of a resolute and devoted people, hard 
beset by a stronger adversary, and struggling with 
the defects of its own civilization, which will 



THE RESOURCES OF THE CONFEDERACY 1 87 

survive when the economic and political lessons 
to be got from the rise and fall of the Confederacy 
shall have lost their value. 

That was what Mr. Henley's sailor saw from 
the Charleston wharf. 

" In and out among the cotton, 
Mud, and chains, and stores, and anchors, 
Tramped a crew of battered scare-crows, 
Poor old Dixie's bottom dollars. 

^" Some had shoes, but all had bayonets. 
Them that wasn't bald was beardless, 
And the drum was rolling Dixie, 
And they stepped to it like men, sir. 

" Rags and tatters, belts and bayonets^ 
On they swung, the drum a-rolling, 
Mum and sour. It looked like fighting, 
And they meant it too, by thunder ! " 



IV. THE KU KLUX MOVEMENT 



IV 

THE KU KLUX MOVEMENT 

Whoever can remember Mr. Edwin Booth in 
the character of Richelieu will doubtless recall 
his expression of the sudden change which 
comes over the melodramatic cardinal toward 
the end of the scene in which his house is 
invaded by the conspirators. While he is igno- 
rant of his danger, his helplessness in the grasp 
of his swarming enemies, Richelieu is all maj- 
esty, all tragedy. But when he learns that 
every avenue of escape is barred, that even 
Huguet is false, that no open force will avail 
him, his towering mood gives place, not indeed 
to any cringing fear, but to subtlety and swift 
contriving. His eyes no longer blaze, but 
twinkle ; his finger is at his chin ; there is a 
semblance of a grin about his lips. 

" All ? Then the lion's skin's too short to-night, — 
Now for the fox's." 

The deathbed stratagem follows. The enemy, 
too powerful to be resisted, is outwitted and 
befooled. 

191 



192 THE KU KLUX MOVEMENT 

About the year 1870, if a Southern negro 
inquired of his former master about " dem Ku 
Kluxes," the response he got was awe-inspiring. 
If a child of the household made the same inquiry 
of his elders, his question was put away with an 
unsatisfying answer and a look like Mr. Booth's 
in the play. Had the great cardinal lived south 
of Mason and Dixon's line in the late sixties and 
early seventies, I fancy he would have found the Ku 
Klux Klan an instrument altogether to his liking. 

The Southern child who, not content with the 
grin and the evasive answer of his father or 
his elder brother, sought further enlightenment 
from his fast friends of the kitchen and the 
quarters, heard such stories of the mysterious, 
sheeted brotherhood as eclipsed in his young 
fancy even the entrancing rivalry of Brer Fox 
and Brer Rabbit, and made the journey back to 
the **big house" at bedtime a terrifying experience. 
Uncle Lewis would tell of a shrouded horseman 
who rode silently up to his door at midnight, 
begged a drink of water, and tossed off a whole 
bucketful at a draught. Uncle Lewis was sure 
he could hear the water sizzling as it flowed 
down that monstrous gullet, and readily accepted 
the stranger's explanation that it was the first 



THE KU KLUX MOVEMENT 1 93 

drop he had tasted since he was killed at Shi- 
loh. Aunt Lou, coming home from a visit to 
a neighboring auntie who was ill, and cross- 
ing a lonesome stretch near the graveyard, had 
distinctly seen a group of horsemen, motionless 
by the roadside, each with his head in his hand. 
Alec, a young mulatto who had once displayed 
much interest in politics, had been stopped on 
his way from a meeting of his " s'iety " by 
a masked horseman, at least eight feet tall, who 
insisted on shaking hands ; and when Alec grasped 
the hand outstretched to him, it was the hand 
of a skeleton. Darkies who, unlike Uncle Lewis 
and Aunt Lou and Alec, had turned against 
their own white people and taken up with the 
carpet-baggers had been more roughly handled. 
Somehow, in one such Southern boy's mem- 
ory, there is always a dim association of these 
Ku Klux stories with other stories of the older 
negroes about " patterrollers." Through them 
all there jingles the refrain : — 

" Run, nigger, run ! 
De patterrollers ketch you ! " 

When that boy went to college and joined a 
society that had initiations, the mystery and 
horror of the Ku Klux stories waned ; but it 



194 THE KU KLUX MOVEMENT 

was not until he read an account of the patrol 
system of slavery times that he saw the connec- 
tion between Ku Klux and "patterrollers." 

An organization which could so mystify all 
but the grown-up white men of a Southern 
household certainly lost none of its mystery in the 
confused accounts that filled the newspapers of 
that day, and citizens of the Northern states, 
already tired of the everlasting Southern question, 
could not be expected to understand it. Con- 
gress, when it undertook to enlighten them, swelled 
its records with much impassioned oratory, and 
through its committees of investigation put into 
print first one and then thirteen bulky volumes of 
reports and testimony, from which he who lives 
long enough to read it all may learn much that is 
true but not particularly important, much that 
is important if true, and somewhat that is both 
true and important. From the mass of it the 
Republican majority got matter sufficient to sus- 
tain one set of conclusions, leaving unused enough 
to sustain quite as strongly the entirely different 
conclusions at which the minority arrived. There 
remained much upon which the novelists, whether 
humorously or sensationally inclined, have drawn 
and may continue to draw. Dr. Conan Doyle, 



THE KU KLUX MOVEMENT 1 95 

seeking to " paint a horror skilfully," found 
the Klan a good nerve-racker, though it is 
to be hoped he did not attempt to digest the 
reports. Voluminous as they are, they need to be 
supplemented with material of a different sort, — ■ 
with such memories as the child of reconstruction 
times can summon up, with such written memo- 
randa and cautious talk as can be won from South- 
erners of an older generation, with such insight as 
one can get into Southern character and habits of 
thought and life, — before one can begin to under- 
stand what the Klan was, or how it came into 
existence, or what its part was in that great con- 
fusion officially styled the Reconstruction of the 
Southern states. 

We may, I think, forbear argument and take 
it for granted that the Ku Klux movement was 
an outcome of the conditions that prevailed in 
the Southern states after the war. It was too 
widespread, too spontaneous, too clearly a popular 
movement, to be attributed to any one man or to 
any conspiracy of a few men. Had it existed 
only in one corner of the South, or drawn its 
membership from a small and sharply defined 
class, some such explanation might serve. But 
we know enough of its extent, its composition, and 



196 THE KU KLUX MOVEMENT 

the various forms it took, to feel sure that it was 
neither an accident nor a mere scheme. It wasA 
no man's contrivance, but an historical develop- \ 
ment. As such, it must be studied against its 
proper background of a disordered society and a / 
bewildered people. 

It will be necessary here to emphasize only one 
feature of the general misgovernment : namely, that 
the evil was by no means confined to the state 
governments, where the bolder adventurers and the 
more stupendous blunderers were at work. The 
itching and galling of the yoke was worst in the^ 
lesser communities, where government touches the \ 
lives of individual men and women most intimately.-^ 
The mismanagement — to use the mildest word — 
of the finances of the states can be shown in figures 
with reasonable clearness. The oppression of 
counties and towns and school districts is less 
easily exhibited, though it was in this way the 
heaviest burdens of taxation were imposed. The 
total increase in the indebtedness of the smaller 
political units under carpet-bag rule was, as a mat- 
ter of fact, even greater than in the case of the 
state governments ; and the wrong was done in 
plainer view of the taxpayer, by acts more openly 
and vulgarly tyrannical. So far as the taxpayer's 



THE KU KLUX MOVEMENT 1 97 

feelings were concerned, piling up state debts had 
the effect which the mismanagement of a bank 
has on the stockholders. The piling up of county 
and town and school taxes was like thrusting 
hands visibly and forcibly into his pockets. It is 
doubtful, however, if even the injury to his for- 
tunes had so much to do with his state of mind 
as the countless humiliations and irritations which 
the rule of the freedman and the stranger brought / 
upon him. 

If the white man of the class long dominant 
in the South was permitted to vote at all, he 
might have hterally to pass under bayonets to 
reach the polls. He saw freedmen organized in 
militia companies, expensively armed and gayly 
caparisoned ; if he offered his own military ser- 
vices, they were sure to be rejected. He saw 
his former slaves repeating at elections, but he 
learned that he had no right of challenge, and 
that there was no penalty fixed by law for the 
crime. In the local courts of justice, he saw his 
friends brought by an odious system of informers 
before judges who were not merely incompetent 
or unfair, like many of those who sat in the higher 
courts, but often grotesquely ignorant as well, and 
who intrusted the execution of their instruments 




198 THE KU KLUX MOVEMENT 

to officials who in many cases could not write an 
intelligible return. In the schools which he was 
so heavily taxed to support, he saw the children 
of his slaves getting book-learning, which he him- 
self thought it unwise to give them, from strangers 
who would be sure to train them into discontent 
with the only lot he thought them fit for and 
the only sort of work which, in the world he 
knew, they ever had a chance to do. He saw the 
Freedmen's Bureau deliberately trying to substi- 
tute its alien machinery for that patriarchal rela- 
tion between white employers and black workmen 
which had seemed to him right and inevitable. 
He saw the Loyal League urging freedmen to take 
up those citizenly powers and duties which, when he 
gave up his sword, he had never understood eman- 
cipation to imply for them. In every boisterous 
shout of a drunken negro before his gate, in every 
insolent glance from a group of idle negroes on the 
streets of the county seat, in the reports of fisti- 
cuffs with little darkies which his children brought 
home from school, in the noises of the night and 
the glare of occasional conflagrations, he saw the 
and or heard the harshly accented voice of the 
stranger in the land. 

It seems astounding, nowadays, that the con- 



THE KU KLUX MOVEMENT 1 99 

gressional leaders in reconstruction did not fore- 
see that men of their own stock, so beset, would 
resist, and would find some means to make 
their resistance effective. When they did make 
up their minds to resist, — not collectively, or 
through any representative body, but singly and 
by neighborhoods, — they found an instrument 
ready to their hands. 

When the Civil War ended, the little town of 
Pulaski, Tennessee, welcomed home a band of 
young men who, though they were veterans 
of hard-fought fields, were for the most part no 
older than the mass of college students^ In the 
general poverty, the exhaustion, the loss of heart, 
naturally prevalent throughout the beaten South, 
young men had more leisure than was good for 
them. A Southern country town, even in the 
halcyon days before the war, was not a particu- 
larly lively place ; and Pulaski in i '^66 was doubt- 
less rather tame to fellows who had seen Pickett's 
charge at Gettysburg or galloped over the country 
with Morgan and Wheeler. A group of them, 
gathered in a law office one evening in May,' 
1866, were discussing ways and means of having 
a livelier time. Some one suggested a club or 
society. An organization with no very definite 



200 THE KU KLUX MOVEMENT 

aims was effected, and at a second meeting, a 
week later, names were proposed and discussed. 
Some one pronounced the Greek word " Kuklos," 
meaning a circle. From " Kuklos " to " Ku Klux" 
was an easy transition, — whoever consults a 
glossary of college boys' slang will not find it 
strange, — and " Klan " followed " Ku Klux " as 
naturally as "• Dumpty " follows " Humpty." That 
the name meant nothing whatever was a recom- 
mendation ; and one can fancy what sort of badi- 
nage would have greeted a suggestion that in six 
years a committee of Congress would devote thir- 
teen volumes to the history of the ** movement " 
that began in a Pulaski law office and migrated 
later to a deserted and half-ruined house in the 
outskirts of the village. 

In the beginning, it was, in fact, no "move- 
ment" at all. It was a scheme for having fun, 
more like a college secret society than anything 
else. Its members were not " lewd fellows of 
the baser sort," but young men of standing in 
the community, who would also have been men 
of wealth if there had been no war. The main 
source of amusement was at first the initiation 
of new members, but later the puzzling of out- 
siders. The only important clause in the oath 



THE KU KLUX MOVEMENT 201 

of membership was a promise of absolute secrecy. 
The disguise was a white mask, a tall card- 
board hat, a gown or robe that covered the 
whole person, and also, when the Klan went 
mounted, a cover for the horses' bodies and 
some sort of muffling for their feet. The chief 
officers were a Grand Cyclops, or president ; a 
Grand Magi, or vice-president; a Grand Turk, 
or marshal; a Grand Exchequer, or treasurer; 
and two Lictors. While the club adhered to its 
original aim and character, only men of known 
good morals were admitted. Born of the same 
impulse and conditions that had led^ to the 
"snipe hunt" and other hazing devices of 
Southern country towns, it was probably as harm- 
less and as unimportant a piece of fooling as 
any to be found inside or outside of colleges. 

The Klan was eminently successful. It got 
all the notoriety it wished, and very soon the 
youth of neighboring communities began to organ- 
ize " dens " of their own. The mysterious fea- 
tures of the Klan were most impressive, and it 
spread most rapidly, in rural neighborhoods. 
Probably it would have become a permanent 
secret society, not unlike the better known of 
the unserious secret orders which are so common 



202 THE KU KLUX MOVEMENT 

throughout the South to-day, but for the state 
of Southern poUtics and the progress of Recon- 
struction. These things, however, soon gave a 
tremendous importance to the Klan's inevitable 
discovery that mystery and fear have over the 
African mind twice the power they have over 
the mind of a white man. It was not the first 
instance in history of a movement which began in 
mere purposeless fooling ending in the most 
serious way. By the time Congress had thrown 
aside the gentle and kindly plan of reconstruc- 
tion which Lincoln conceived and Johnson could 
not carry out, the Ku Klux had taught the 
white men of Tennessee and neighboring states 
the power of mystery over the credulous race 
which Congress was bent on intrusting with the 
most difficult tasks of citizenship. When Southern 
society, turned upside down, groped about for 
some means of righting itself, it grasped the 
Pulaski idea. 

As it happened, Tennessee, the original home of 
the Klan, was the very state in which reconstruc- 
tion began earliest ; and though the course of events 
there was somewhat different from the experience 
of the Cotton states, Tennessee was also the first 
state to find its social and governmental systems 



THE KU KLUX MOVEMENT 203 

upside down. It was notable for its large Union- 
ist population. The Unionists were strongest in 
the mountainous eastern half of the state, while 
the western half, dominant before the war, was 
strongly secessionist. The first step in Recon- 
struction was to put the east Tennesseeans into 
power; and the leader of the east Tennessee 
Unionists was " Parson " Brownlow. Apart from 
his Unionism, Brownlow is generally conceded 
to have been an extremely unfit man for great 
public responsibilities, and when he became gov- 
ernor the secessionists had to endure much the 
same sort of misgovernment which in other 
states was attributable to carpet-bag officials. 
By the time it was a year old, the Klan had 
gradually developed into a society of regula- 
tors, using its pecuHar devices and its acciden- 
tally discovered power chiefly to repress the 
lawlessness into which white men of Brownlow' s 
following were sometimes led by their long- 
nourished grudge against their former rulers, 
and into which freedmen fell so inevitably that 
no fair-minded historian can mete out to them 
a hard measure of censure for it. In the Union 
League the Klan found its natural enemy; and 
it is quite probably true that, during the early 



204 ^^-^ ^U KLUX MOVEMENT 

period of their rivalry for control, more inexcus- 
able violence proceeded from the League than 
from the Klan. 

However, a survivor and historian of the 
Klan does not deny that even thus early the 
abuses inseparable from secrecy existed in 
the order. To suppress them, and to adapt the 
order to its new and serious work, a convention 
was held at Nashville early in 1867. The Klan, 
up to that time bound together only by a gen- 
eral deference to the Grand Cyclops of the 
Pulaski "Den," was organized into the "Invis- 
ible Empire of the South," ruled by a Grand 
Wizard of the whole Empire, a Grand Dragon 
of each Realm, or state, a Grand Titan of each 
Dominion (Province), or county, a Grand Cyclops 
of each Den, and staff officers with names 
equally terrifying. The objects of the Klan, 
now that it had serious objects, were defined. 
They were, to protect the people from indignities 
and wrongs; to succor the suffering, particularly 
the families of dead Confederate soldiers; to 
defend "the Constitution of the United States, 
and all laws passed in conformity thereto," and 
of the states also; and to aid in executing all 
constitutional laws, and protect the people from 



THE KU KLUX MOVEMENT 205 

unlawful seizures and from trial otherwise than 
by jury. Acts of the Brownlow legislature re- 
viving the ahen and sedition laws were par- 
ticularly aimed at. 

From this time, the Klan put itself more 
clearly in evidence, generally adhering to its 
original devices of mystery and silence, but too 
often yielding to the temptation to add to these 
violence. On the night of July 4, by well- 
heralded parades, it exhibited itself throughout 
Tennessee, and perhaps in other states, more 
impressively than ever before. At Pulaski, some 
four hundred disguised horsemen marched and 
countermarched silently through the streets 
before thousands of spectators, and not a single 
disguise was penetrated. The effect of mystery 
even on intelligent minds was well illustrated in 
the estimate, made by ** reputable citizens," that 
the number was not less than three thousand. 
Members who lived in the town averted suspi- 
cion from themselves by appearing undisguised 
among the spectators. A gentleman who prided 
himself on knowing every horse in the county 
attempted to identify one by lifting its robe, 
only to discover that the animal and the saddle 
were his own ! 



206 THE KU KLUX MOVEMENT 

The remaining facts in the history of the 
Ku Klux proper need not be told at length. 
The effectiveness of the order was shown wher- 
ever, by its original methods, it exerted itself to 
quiet disturbed communities. Wherever freedmen 
grew unruly, disguised horsemen appeared by 
night, and thereafter the darkies of the neigh- 
borhood inclined to stay under cover after day- 
light failed. But the order had grown too large, 
it was too widespread, the central authority was 
too remote from the local " dens," and the gen- 
eral scheme was too easily grasped and copied. 
It was too hard to keep out such men as 
would incline to use violence, or to cover 
with the mantle of secrecy enterprises of a 
doubtful or even criminal cast. In Tennessee, 
the Brownlow government was bitterly hostile, 
and in September, 1868, the legislature passed a 
statute, aimed entirely at the Ku Klux, which 
went beyond the later congressional statutes in 
the penalties it prescribed for every act that 
could possibly imply complicity in the "con- 
spiracy," and in the extraordinary powers it con- 
ferred upon officers and all others who should 
aid in detecting or arresting Ku Klux. The 
members of the order were practically outlawed, 



THE KU KLUX MOVEMENT 20J 

and felt themselves justified in resorting to 
measures of self-defence which the central 
officers could not approve. In February, 1869, 
Governor Brownlow proclaimed martial law in 
several Tennessee counties. His term of office 
expired the next day. The growing evils 
within the order, as well as the dangers which 
threatened it, doubtless made the wiser heads 
of the Klan readier to conclude that with the 
repeal of the alien and sedition laws, and 
Brownlow's departure for the United States 
Senate, its work in Tennessee was done. So, a 
few weeks later, by an order o^ the Grand 
Wizard, the Klan was formally disbanded, not 
only in Tennessee, but everywhere. It is gen- 
erally understood that the Grand Wizard who 
issued that order was no less a person than 
Nathan Bedford Forrest. How many dens ever 
received the order, and how many of those 
that received it also obeyed it, will never be 
known, any more than it will be known how 
many dens there were, or how many mem- 
bers. However, the early spring of 1869 may 
be taken as the date when the Ku Klux 
Klan, which gave its name and its idea to the 
secret movement which began the undoing of 



208 THE KU KLUX MOVEMENT 

reconstruction, ceased to exist as an organized 
body. 

But the history of the original Ku Klux Klan 
is only a part — and perhaps not the most im- 
portant part — of the movement which in the 
North was cajled— the-4Cu.Klux conspiracy, and 
in the South is to this day regarded, with 
a truer sense of its historical importance, what- 
ever one may think of its moral character, as 
comparable to that secret movement by which, 
under the very noses of French garrisons, Stein 
and Scharnhorst organized the great Germ.an 
struggle for liberty. Of the disguised bands 
which appeared and disappeared throughout the 
[South so long as the carpet-baggers controlled 
the state governments, it is probable that not 
orfe-hajf were veritable Ku Klux. Some were 
members of other orders, founded in imitation 
of the Ku Klux, and using similar methods. 
Others were probably neighborhood affairs only. 
Yet others were simply bands of ruffians who oper- 
ated in the night-time and availed themselves 
of Ku Klux methods to attain personal ends 
which, whether criminal or not, were not approved 
by the leaders in the Ku Klux and other similar 
organizations. How large a proportion of the 



THE KU KLUX MOVEMENT 209 

violence and crime attributed to the Ku Klux 
should rightly be attributed to these lawless bands, 
it is, of course, impossible to say. It seems that 
a number of those taken in disguise proved to 
be men of such antecedents, so clearly identified 
with the radical party, that they could not pos- 
sibly have been members of the Ku Klux, the 
Knights of the White Camellia, or any other of 
the orders whose raison d'etre was the revolt 
against radical rule. But it is equally beyond 
question that the orders themselves were respon- 
sible for many indefensible proceedings. 

The order of the Knights of the White CamelHa 
was probably the largest and most important of 
them all — larger even than the true Ku Klux 
Klan. It was founded at New Orleans late in 
1867 or early in 1868 and spread rapidly over 
the states to the east and west, from Texas to 
the CaroHnas. A constitution adopted in June, 
1868, provided for an elaborate organization by 
states, counties, and smaller communities, the 
affairs of the whole order to be committed to a 
supreme council at New Orleans. The recollec- 
tion of members, however, is to the effect that 
very little authority was really exercised by the 
supreme council or even by the state councils, 



2IO THE KU KLUX MOVEMENT 

that the county organizations were reasonably 
well maintained, but that in most respects each 
circle acted independently. The constitution and 
the oath and ceremonial of initiation commit the 
order to a very clear and decided stand on 
the chief question of the day. Only white men 
eighteen years of age or older were admitted, 
and the initiate promised not merely to be secret 
and obedient, but "to maintain and defend the 
social and political superiority of the white race on 
this continent." The charge or lecture to the 
initiate set forth historical evidences of the supe- 
riority of the white race, made an argument for 
white supremacy, and painted the horrors of 
miscegenation. It enjoined fairness to negroes, 
and the concession to them of " the fullest 
measure of those rights which we recognize as 
theirs." The association, so the charge explained, 
was not a political party, and had no connection 
with any. The constitution, moreover, restrained 
the order from nominating or supporting candi- 
dates for office. 

The '' Pale Faces," the " Constitutional Union 
Guards," the "White Brotherhood," were other 
names borne by bands of men who did Ku Klux 
work. The majority of the congressional com- 



THE KU KLUX MOVEMENT 211 

mittee somehow got the notion that these were 
the real names, at different periods, of the one 
order which pervaded the entire South, and that 
" Ku Klux " was a name foisted on the pubHc 
to the end that a member, when put upon the 
witness stand in a law court, might deny all 
knowledge of the organization. But the evidence 
of the existence of the true Ku Klux Klan, of 
its priority to all similar organizations of any 
importance, and of the existence of other orders 
with different names, is now too strong to permit 
of any doubt. The comparative strength of the 
various associations; the connection^ if any there 
was, between them; the character of their mem- 
bership ; the differences in their aims and methods ; 
— on these things it is not probable that any clear 
light will ever be thrown. Surviving members 
are themselves somewhat hazy on such questions. 
And indeed it is not of the first importance that 
they should be answered ; for we have enough 
to show how the Ku Klux idea worked itself out, 
and with what results. 

The working of the plan is exhibited, mOre 
authoritatively than I could portray it, in the 
memoranda of a gentle and kindly man, albeit 
a resolute wearer of a Confederate button, who, 



212 THE KU KLUX MOVEMENT 

thirty years ago, was the absolute chief of the 
Knights of the White Camellia in a certain county 
in the heart of the Black Belt. Speaking of the 
county organization merely, he says : — 

''The authority of the commander (this office 
I held) was absolute. All were sworn to obey 
his orders. There was an inner circle in each 
circle, to which was committed any particular 
work: its movements were not known to other 
members of the order. This was necessary, 
because, in our neighborhood, almost every South- 
ern man was a member. At meetings of the 
full circle there was but little consideration as 
to work. The topic generally was law and order, 
and the necessity for organization. In fact, 
almost every meeting might have been public, 
so far as the discussions were concerned. 

" For the methods employed : in some cases 
they were severe, even extreme, but I believe 
they were necessary, although there was much 
wrong done when commanders were not the right 
men. There was too good an opportunity for 
individuals to take vengeance for personal griev- 
ances. A man, black or white, found dead in 
the road would furnish undisputed evidence that 
the Ku Klux Klan had been abroad. The officers 



THE KU KLUX MOVEMENT 213 

of the law, even judges, were members; a jury 
could not be drawn without a majority of our 
men. In this county, no act of violence was 
committed by our circle. We operated on the 
terror inspired by the knowledge that we were 
organized. The carpet-baggers lived in constant 
dread of a visit, and were in great measure con- 
trolled through their fears. At one time, if one of 
our people threatened or abused a carpet-bagger, 
his house or stable would be fired that night.^ . . . 
This occurred so often that it was impossible to 
separate the two events. Word was accordingly 
sent to a prominent carpet-bagger that if the 
thing happened again we would take him out 
at midday and hang him. There were no more 
fires. 

" The negroes had meetings at some point every 
night, in obedience to the orders of the carpet- 
baggers, who kept them organized in this way. 
So long as their meetings were orderly, we did not 
interfere; but when I got information that they 
were becoming disorderly and offensive, I ordered 
out a body of horsemen, who divided into squads 

1 Here he refers to the oiling and firing of the stables of that 
particular Southern household in which the boyish inquiries I have 
referred to made a beginning of the investigations on which this 
paper is based. 



214 ^^-^ ^U KLUX MOVEMENT 

and stationed themselves where the negroes would 
pass on their way home. They were permitted to 
dress themselves in any fashion their fancies might 
dictate, but their orders were positive not to utter 
a word or molest a negro in any manner. I rarely 
had to send twice to the same neighborhood. Oc- 
casionally a large body was sent out to ride about 
all night, with the same instructions as to silence. 
While the law against illegal voting had no 
penalty for the offence (no doubt an intentional 
omission) negroes often voted more than once at 
the same election. They assembled in such 
crowds at the polls that one had almost to fight 
one's way to deposit a ballot. A body of our men 
was detailed on election day to go early and take 
possession, with the usual order for silence. Few 
negroes voted that day ; none twice. No violence. 
** We put up with carpet-bag rule as long as we 
could stand it. Then a messenger was sent to 
each of them — they were filling all the county 
offices — to tell them we had decided they must 
leave. This was all that was needed. They had 
been expecting it, they said, and they left without 
making any resistance. Owing to some local 

circumstances, the circle at was disbanded 

about the time of President Grant's proclamation. 



THE KU KLUX MOVEMENT 21 5 

but we were not influenced by it in any degree. 
I think there were few cases of the disbandment 
of circles. The necessity for their existence ex- 
pired with the exodus of the carpet-baggers." 

That was the modus operandi^ under a cautious 
and intelligent commander, in a neighborhood 
largely inhabited by men of birth and education. 
As it happens, the recollections of the commander 
are corroborated by one of the young men who 
obeyed his orders, now attorney-general of the 
state, who adds that the proportion of "tom- 
foolery" to violence was about, looo to i. But 
even this straightforward recital of the successful 
performance of an apparently commendable work 
must make plain to any thoughtful reader the 
danger inseparable from the power of such an 
organization. In communities less intelligent, or 
where no such fit leader was chosen, the story was 
far different. 

That violence was often used cannot be denied. 
Negroes were often whipped, and so were carpet- 
baggers. The incidents related in such stories as 
Tourgee's " A Fool's Errand " all have their coun- 
terparts in the testimony before congressional com- 
mittees and courts of law. In some cases, after 
repeated warnings, men were dragged from their 



2l6 THE KU KLUX MOVEMENT 

beds and slain by persons in disguise, and the 
courts were unable to find or to convict the mur- 
derers. Survivors of the orders affirm that such 
work was done in most cases by persons not con- 
nected with them or acting under their authority. 
It is impossible to prove or disprove their state- 
ments. When such outrages were committed, not 
on worthless adventurers, who had no station in 
the Northern communities from which they came, 
but on cultivated persons who had gone South 
from genuinely philanthropic motives, — no matter 
how unwisely or tactlessly they went about their 
work, — the natural effect was to horrify and 
enrage the North. 

The white teachers in the negro schools were 
probably the class which suffered most innocently, 
not ordinarily from violence, but from the count- 
less other ways in which Southern society made 
them aware that they were unwelcome and that 
their mission was disapproved. They themselves, 
in too many instances, disregarded the boundary 
lines between different social classes, as rigid 
and cruel in democracies as anywhere else. 
Associating constantly with freedmen, they could 
not reasonably expect any kindly recognition from 
men and women who, under other conditions, 



THE KU KLUX MOVEMENT 21 7 

might have been their friends. They too often 
not merely disregarded, but even criticised and 
attacked, those usages and traditions which 
gave to Southern Hfe a charm and distinc- 
tion not elsewhere found in America. A wiser 
and more candid study of the conditions under 
which their work must be done, an avoidance of 
all hostility to whatever they might leave alone 
without sacrifice of principle, would perhaps have 
tempered the bitterness of Southern resentment at 
their presence. We may also admit that the sort 
of education they at first offered the freedmen was 
useless, or worse than useless, — that theirs was a 
fool's errand. But they should never have been 
confounded with the creatures who came, not to 
help the negro, but to use him. The worst work 
the Ku Klux ever did was its opposition to negro 
schools, and the occasional expulsion or even 
violent handling of teachers. There were adven- 
turers in the schoolhouses, and probably there 
were honest men in the legislatures, the courts, the 
executive offices ; but as a class the teachers were 
far better than the others. The failure to discrim- 
inate in their favor doubtless did more than any- 
thing else to confirm the minds of honest and 
well-meaning people of the North in the belief 



2l8 THE KU KLUX MOVEMENT 

that it was the baser elements of Southern society, 
and not its intelligent and responsible men, who 
had set to work to overthrow the carpet-bag 
regime. 

The Ku Klux movement was not entirely under- 
ground. Sheeted horsemen riding about in the 
night-time were not its only forces. Secrecy and 
silence were indeed its main devices, but others 
were employed. The life of the carpet-bagger was 
made wretched otherwise than by dragging him 
from his bed and flogging him. The scorn in 
which he was held was made plain to him by 
averted faces or contemptuous glances on the 
street, by the obstacles he encountered in business, 
by the empty pews in his neighborhood when he 
went to church. If his children went to school, 
they were not asked to join in the play of other chil- 
dren, and must perforce fall back upon the com- 
panionship of little darkies. He himself, if he took 
the Southern view of " difficulties," and held him- 
self ready to answer an insult with a blow, was sure 
to be accommodated whenever he felt belligerent. 
Probably not one in ten of his neighbors had given 
up the creed of the duello, though its ceremonial 
was not often observed. As for the " scalawag," 
— the Southerner who went over to the radicals, — 



THE KU KLUX MOVEMENT 219 

there was reserved for him a deeper hatred, a 
loftier contempt, than even the carpet-bagger got 
for his portion. No aUen enemy, however despic- 
able, is ever so loathed as a renegade. 

But the Invisible Empire, however its sway was 
exercised, was everywhere a real empire. Wisely 
and humanely, or roughly and cruelly and crimi- 
nally, the work was done. The state governments, 
under radical control, made little headway with 
their freedmen's militia against the silent represen- 
tatives of the white man's will to rule. After 
1870, even the blindest of the Reconstruction lead- 
ers in Congress were made to see that they had 
built their house upon the sands. During the 
winter of 1870-71, Southern outrages were the 
subject of congressional debates and presidential 
messages. In March, a Senate committee pre- 
sented majority and minority reports on the result 
of its investigations in North Carolina. The ma- 
jority found that there was a criminal conspiracy, 
of a distinctly political nature, against the laws 
and against colored citizens. The minority found 
that the misgovernment and the unscrupulous ex- 
ploiting of the Southern states by radical leaders 
had provoked a natural resistance and led to disor- 
der and violence. In April, the first Ku Klux bill, 



220 THE KU KLUX MOVEMENT 

"to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment," was 
passed; the President was empowered to use the 
troops, and even to suspend the writ of habeas cor- 
pus. The second Ku Klux bill, " to enforce the right 
of citizens of the United States to vote," was passed 
in May. In October, the President issued his 
proclamation. Troops were freely employed wher- 
ever there was an opportunity to use them, and 
the writ was suspended in nine counties of South 
Carolina. Hundreds of men were brought to trial 
before United States courts under the two laws, 
and a number were convicted ; but the leading 
men in the great orders were never reached. 
Northern writers have expressed the opinion that 
by the beginning of 1872 the "conspiracy" was 
overthrown. Nevertheless, the joint committee 
proceeded with its labors, and in February pre- 
sented its great report on The Condition of Affairs 
in the Late Insurrectionary States. Majority and 
minority differed, as before ; but the volume of 
reports and the twelve volumes of testimony ena- 
bled the one side to prove more conclusively that 
^crimes had been committed for political ends, 
and the other to set forth with more convincing 
fulness the true nature of carpet-bag rule. In 
May, a bill extending the President's extraordinary 



THE KU KLUX MOVEMENT 221 

powers over to the next session of Congress passed 
the Senate, but was lost in the House. How much 
the action of Congress and the President had to do 
with the disappearance of the Ku Klux, it is impos- 
sible to say. But after 1872 the Ku Klux did, for 
the most part, disappear ; and so, in one state after 
another, did the carpet-bagger and the scalawag. 
The fox's skin had served its turn before it was 
cast aside. v 

Such, in brief outline, was the Ku Klux con- 
spiracy according to the Northern view, the revolt 
against tyranny according to the Southern view, 
which was the beginning of the end of Reconstruc- 
tion. It was the unexpected outcome of a situation 
unexampled, and not even closely paralleled, in 
history. To many minds, it seemed to nullify the 
war, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the con- 
stitutional amendments which were meant to seal 
forever the victory of the North over the South, 
and of liberty over slavery. To minds just as honest, 
it seemed to reassert the great principles of the 
American Revolution. The majority of the con- 
gressional committee conducted their investigation 
after the manner of prosecuting attorneys dealing 
with ordinary criminals. The minority felt them- 
selves bound to consider whether " an indictment 



222 THE KU KLUX MOVEMENT 

against a whole people" would lie. To the ma- 
jority, " Ku Klux" meant simply outlaws; the 
minority thought that the first Ku Klux in history 
were the disguised men who, against the law, threw 
the tea overboard in Boston Harbor. 
/ The two views of the movement, like the move- 
' ment itself, and all that led up to it, are part and 
parcel of that division which was marked by 
Mason and Dixon's line. It was a division of in- 

^ ^titutions ; it was a division of interests ; it was, 

, and is still, a division of character and habits of 
i thought. Northern men had one idea of the strife, 
'^ and Southern men an entirely different idea. The 
Southerners did not and could not regard them- 
selves as rebels forced to be loyal. They knew 
they were beaten, and they gave up the fight ; but 
they could not see how they were bound to coop- 
erate in any further plans of their conquerors. 
President Lincoln had made it plain that if the 
Union arms prevailed slavery must go, and the 
Southerners, in their state conventions of 1865, for- 
mally abolished it. Secession had been tried, and 
had failed as a policy ; they declared that they 
would not try it again. Left for a moment to 
themselves, they set to work on an arrangement 
that would enable them to use under freedom the 



THE KU KLUX MOVEMENT 223 

same sort of labor they had used under slavery, 
and made a place in the new order for the blacks, 
whom they could not reduce to slavery again, but 
whom they felt to be unfit for citizenship. Then 
Congress interfered and undid their work, and they 
stood passive until they could see what the con- 
gressional scheme would be like. They found it 
bad, oppressive, unwise, impossible. They bore it 
awhile in silence. Then in silence they made up / 
their minds to resist. What form could their re- 
sistance take } It must be revolutionary, for they 
had formally renounced the right of secession. It 
could not be open war, for they were powerless to 
fight. So they made a secret revolution. Their 
rebellion could not raise its head, so it went under- 
ground. 

If one asks of the movement, "Was it neces- 
sary ? " this much, at least, may be answered : that 
no other plan of resistance would have served so 
well. If one asks, "Was it successful.?" the an- 
swer is plain. No open revolt ever succeeded 
more completely. If one asks, "Was it justifia- 
ble .'' " the " yes " or " no " is harder to say. There 
must be much defining of terms, much patient sep- 
arating of the accidental from the essential, much 
inquiry into motives. Describe the movement 



224 THE KU KLUX MOVEMENT 

broadly as a secret movement, operating by terror 
^nd violence to nullify laws, and one readily con- 
demns it. Paint all the conditions, enter into the 
minds and hearts of the men who lived under 
them, look at them through their eyes, suffer with 
their angry pain, and one revolts as their pride 
revolted. Weigh the broad rule, which is less a 
"light to guide" than a "rod to check,*' against 
the human impulse, and the balance trembles. 
One is ready to declare, not, perhaps, that the end 
justified the means, but that never before was an 
end so clearly worth fighting for made so clearly 
unattainable by any good means. 

Nor does our hindsight much avail us. The 
end attained was mainly good. Southern society 
was righted. But the method of it survives in too 
many habits of the Southern mind, in too many 
shortcomings of Southern civilization, in too many 
characteristics of Southern life. The Southern 
whites, solidified in resistance to carpet-bag rule, 
have kept their solidarity unimpaired by any 
healthful division on public questions. Having 
learned a lesson, they cannot forget it. Having 
seen forms of law used to cloak oppression, and 
liberty invoked to countenance a tyranny, they 
learned to set men above political principles, and 



THE KU KLUX MOVEMENT 22$ 

good government above freedom of thought. For 
thkty years they have continued to set one ques- 
tion above all others, and thus debarred themselves 
from full participation in the political life of the 
country. As they rule by fear, so by fear are they 
ruled. It is they themselves who are now be- 
fooled, and robbed of the nobler part of their own 
political birthright. They outdid their conquerors, 
yet they are n^t free. 



V. A NEW HERO OF AN OLD 
TYPE 



V 

A NEW HERO OF AN OLD TYPE 

In nothing was the national sense of the emer- 
gency in which we found ourselves in consequence 
of the war with Spain more clearly shown than in 
the popular feeling toward the men who distin- 
guished themselves in the fighting. The man who 
could fight for us was the man of the hour. But 
yesterday, the politician had overshadowed him ; 
even the man of letters had held a higher place 
in our regard. The purveyor of amusement knew 
him, indeed, as a picturesque figure on the stage ; 
but how many of us, as we turned from the burial 
of the great captains of the Civil War, gave a 
serious thought to the men at the head of our 
diminutive army.? How many of us even knew 
who commanded the Asiatic squadron until the 
newspapers set us listening for the cannonade on 
the other side of the world ? As to the young 
hero, many of us, no doubt, were fondly hoping 
that as the world grew gentler some other figure 
might take his place in our hearts. He seemed 
to belong to the past, to history and drama and 

229 



230 A NEW HERO OF AN OLD TYPE 

poetry, until suddenly we found ourselves in need 
of him. As suddenly, and with every dramatical 
accompaniment, through the battle smoke and 
dim light of the dawn at Santiago, he appeared. 
Again he took his ancient place in our hearts, as 
in the van of our enterprise. The sudden need of 
him was distressing, but who of all our millions 
was not brighter eyed when he came } 

The fitness of American soldiers and sailors to 
do our fighting became an object of serious in- 
quiry only when it was too late to make any radi- 
cal changes in our military and naval methods 
before the trial. The West- Pointer at his dreary 
post on the frontier, the naval officer testing his 
projectiles, were less interesting than the college 
athlete on the foot-ball field or in the racing shell. 
We took little thought of the men who must 
now represent us before England, which expected 
so much of us, and before Europe, which appar- 
ently expected so little. To show that there was 
courage and skill at the head of our armaments 
was the part of Admiral Dewey. To prove that 
heroism of the highest military type abounded in 
the breasts of the generation on which the fight- 
ing work of the war must fall, and likewise the later 
work, which the war would entail, was the op- 



A NEW HERO OF AN OLD TYPE 23 1 

portunity of eight men at Santiago. To associate 
a name altogether new to larger history with the 
shining names of those who have from time to 
time illustrated the capacity of his race for mas- 
terful handling of danger was the supreme privi- 
lege of a youth whose deserts it is well for us to 
know, since otherwise we might not feel sure of 
the justice of fame's award, and whose character 
and training are still very important subjects of 
reflection, since he stands so conspicuously for his 
fellows in our service. 

When the American fleet firsl advanced toward 
the Cuban shores, the human element in its iron 
might was typified for me by a single boyish 
figure outlined against a background utterly un- 
suggestive of the sea, but a figure none the less 
suggestive of all that is essential in the man 
behind the gun. The night before we heard the 
news of the Merrimac exploit, a name was often 
on my lips, joined, in comfortable talk, with the 
prediction that only failure of opportunity could 
keep it obscure. The next day, the name was 
famous, and the boyish figure, enlarged to Ho- 
meric manhood, erect and masterful on the perilous 
bridge of the Merrimac, was for the moment quite 
the most notable figure in the world. 



232 A NEW HERO OF AN OLD TYPE 

The emergency and the mood of the nation 
made that earlier background of young Hobson's 
figure pecuharly important ; for it was a back- 
ground of cotton fields and newly liberated 
slaves. It is surely a hopeful augury that our 
first young hero came to us from the one region 
from which we had, apparently, better reason to 
expect imperfect devotion to the Republic than 
from any other ; a region from which the more 
ignorant of our adversaries actually expected aid 
and comfort. 

Thirty years ago, the South was not a source of 
confidence to the champions of American democ- 
racy. Americans were in worse state there than 
they have been anywhere else or at any other 
time. Defeated in a long war, impoverished, and 
given over to a hard rule, the men who there 
represented the English race were as near despair 
as Englishmen have ever been since the Armada. 
A child's face is apt to take on the expression of 
the faces around it, and the faces of men and 
women in Alabama in the early seventies were not 
happy faces, as a rule. It was patience that shone 
clearest on the women's brows. The biographer 
of the late Justice Lamar makes a very striking 
picture of the man one might have seen in those 



A NEW HERO OF AN OLD TYPE 233 

days in the little town of Oxford, Mississippi, lean- 
ing stolidly over the ruinous fence in front of his 
house, heavy-browed, coatless, the great mass of 
his hair and beard neglected and unkempt, ac- 
knowledging with a surly nod the greetings of his 
acquaintance. A bright-eyed young editor in 
Atlanta, naturally of a joyous temper, used to sit 
for hours gazing abstractedly out of the window 
of his cheerless office ; in another country, he 
might very well have fallen under suspicion of 
meditating sedition. 

The boy whom I first knew among the Alabama 
cotton fields was grave-faced. His manner was 
stiff and formal ; his conversation, almost comi- 
cally stilted. One might have thought him heavy- 
natured if it had not been for his eyes. In 
them there was a smouldering fierceness which 
I did not understand, for his bearing was modest 
to gentleness, and his voice had all the drawl- 
ing sweetness of the leisurely civilization out of 
which he came. Sometimes, however, in base- 
ball and other sports, it had a tone of authority 
which provoked less resistance than an attitude 
of superiority is apt to provoke among people in 
whom association with a subject race has bred an 
imperious temper. For the rest, he stood out 



234 A NEW HERO OF AN OLD TYPE 

from his fellows chiefly by reason of the steadfast- 
ness with which he kept in mind the possibility 
of an honorable career and the fearlessness with 
which he addressed himself to the more serious 
concerns of boyhood. That attitude toward life 
was somewhat remarkable, for the shadow of de- 
feat, the reality of suffering, made doggedness 
commoner than ambition. 

Many of the older men failed altogether to take 
heart for new careers. In men of the coarser sort, 
Reconstruction had bred more bitterness of sec- 
tional feeling than the war itself had produced. 
The weaker sort simply went to the wall. But it 
is clear now that neither the coarse nor the weak 
were the representative men of the South, even 
under conditions so unfamiliar to the race as pre- 
vailed there in Reconstruction times. Lamar's 
stony silence, unbroken since his voice was heard 
in the Mississippi secession convention, was broken 
at last in fervent eulogy of the dead Sumner, the 
champion of human freedom. The Atlanta editor 
won a sudden and unexampled eminence as the 
orator of a new patriotism in the reconstructed 
South. The grave-faced boy, deliberately conse- 
crated to the flag against which his father and his 
kindred had fought in many battles, gave the best 



A NEW HERO OF AN OLD TYPE 235 

possible proof that it is the flag of a united people ; 
he put into a glorious deed, and not into mere 
eloquent words, the protestations of Lamar and 
Grady. For Americans, in whom there is no 
finer quality than ready trust, their words were 
perhaps sufficient ; but his deed was for the 
world. 

This especial significance of the deed is enough 
to make it memorable; it exhibited a patriotism 
which was itself, in some degree, an achievement, 
and Americans everywhere welcomed it for that 
reason. But the deed in its «wn character was 
representative in a far broader sense than this. 
It is a fit deed to stand for us whenever peoples 
are judged by their deeds. The life at Annapo- 
lis had served not merely to teach Hobson all the 
new devices of the dreadful science he had set out 
to learn, but also to develop the forward-looking 
planning, eager spirit which was always in him, 
and by virtue of which he was American and 
democratic to the core. Democracy has its uses 
even in a military array. Our highest military 
and naval traditions are of enterprise, no less than 
obedience to command ; of finding the way to vic- 
tory, no less than marching therein fearlessly. 
The incident of his temporary ostracism for re- 



236 A NEW HERO OF AN OLD TYPE 

porting a classmate, so far from being the extraor- 
dinary and sensational martyrdom it has been 
painted, was neither unprecedented nor unchar- 
acteristic of the place. He accepted it, as others 
have accepted it, simply as a test of his manhood : 
such a test as democracies alone afford. When 
his classmates finally offered him fellowship, they 
were not conquered revilers of superior merit, but 
merely young Americans awakened to the neces- 
sity of respecting an honest conviction. Perhaps 
a slight increase of gravity, and the accentuation 
of his peculiar formality of speech, may be attrib- 
uted to the loneliness of his life there ; but the 
wound left no ugly scar. It was not the cause 
of his studious habits. He would have gone to 
the head of his class in any event, and would have 
been, as he was, a fair mark for such mischievous 
girls as delight in harassing a sturdy and untrifling 
masculinity. If heavier chastisement of disappoint- 
ment and renunciation was not wanting, it merely 
strengthened his devotion to his work, confirmed 
his strong religious bent, and armed him com- 
pletely against all but the last infirmity of noble 
minds. His original and inventive faculty, and 
his elaborate study of naval construction, gave 
him, no doubt, an especial fitness for his task at 



A NEW HERO OF AN OLD TYPE 237 

Santiago; but far more essential was the serene 
self-confidence which his straitened childhood, his 
harassed boyhood, his chastened young manhood, 
had helped to build. When the hour of his trial 
came, it found him no less master of himself than 
of his ship. 

The opportunity was his because he made it. 
The Spanish fleet, having for a time befooled the 
board of strategy at Washington, and easily 
avoided the stronger but slower fleet of Admiral 
Sampson, had at length taken refuge in the har- 
bor of Santiago. Commodore, Schley, hurrying 
southward from Hampton Roads with the flying 
squadron, and ascertaining, after some indecision, 
the whereabouts of the enemy, found the harbor 
such a rat-hole for narrowness of channel that to 
enter it seemed to mean the certain loss of the 
first ship, and this, if sunk in the narrower part of 
the channel, would effectually block the way for 
thpse which followed. Admiral Sampson, arriving 
soon afterwards, and seeing that the Spanish 
cruisers had put themselves out of the fighting so 
long as their exit was barred, at once began to 
consider if some means could not be found to 
guard against the only possibility of Cervera's es- 
cape : a storm or fog, which might defeat the 



233 A NEW HERO OF AN OLD TYPE 

watchfulness of the Americans. He was no 
sooner resolved upon the plan than Hobson, who 
had asked for sea service in view of just such 
work, was ready with the details of it. It was to 
sink the Merrimac^ a huge collier whose defective 
machinery impaired her usefulness, lengthwise 
across the channel. Working night and day, he 
soon had the collier swept clear of her movable 
cargo, improvised torpedoes placed where their 
work would be done quickest, and the electric con- 
nection arranged. The time she would take to 
settle, the number of her crew, and the duties of 
each man, were all minutely calculated and ex- 
plained. So were the chances of going to the 
bottom before she could reach her destination. 
There were the mines, the fire from the forts, 
her own torpedoes : everything was considered but 
his own chance of life. Asked about that, he 
treated the inquiry as irrelevant to the scientific 
problem he had in hand. It was a question of 
getting in, not of getting out. 

This was not the Latin bravery that dares for 
the sake of daring. The deed was essentially 
English, essentially American. It was planned 
and done in the calm northern mood that belongs 
to men of clear eyes and quiet speech, and is 



A NEW HERO OF AN OLD TYPE 239 

commonest among men who pray. Whatever 
there was of excitement in it was religious — the 
ecstasy of martyrdom. That such a spirit sur- 
vives among us is more important than that war- 
making is become a science, or that the fleet 
behind the Merrimac was iron clad, or that 
modern fortifications, and not merely an ancient 
castle, guarded the harbor's mouth. 

The spirit was indeed rampant in the fleet. The 
signal for volunteers brought an embarrassment of 
riches. To choose his companions was the hard- 
est part of his making ready. Enough to man a 
squadron volunteered, and for these there was less 
of fame to win than for the leader. He himself 
could not have held fast to his place but for his 
share in planning the enterprise and his knowing 
best how to carry it out. How dear the enter- 
prise had grown to him since he conceived it was 
made clear when it was delayed. All was ready 
late in the night of Thursday, the second of June, 
and the Merrimac set forth ; but the Admiral, 
seeing that day was near breaking, sent a torpedo 
boat to recall her. It took two orders to bring 
her back, and then something happened quite out 
of keeping with Hobson's contained and disci- 
plined bearing throughout his life. The old 



240 A NEW HERO OF AN OLD TYPE 

Cromwell stirred in his breast. Begrimed and 
blackened with his work, his face seamed with 
lines of sleeplessness and care, his deep eyes no 
longer smouldering but aflame, he turned on the 
Admiral with such high words as hardly his infe- 
riors had ever heard him speak before. " There 
must be no more recalls. My men have been 
keyed up for twenty-four hours, and under a tre- 
mendous pressure. Iron will break at last." 
Soothed with good-humored counsel, he waited 
impatiently for darkness. 

The next night made amends. It was not dark 
or stormy, but the moon was veiled. The hour 
before the dawn was chosen, but many anxious 
watchers from the fleet saw the Merrimac melt 
away into the gloom with the tall figure motionless 
on the bridge. A little launch, meant for the 
rescue of any one that might escape both death 
and capture, followed behind. When the collier 
came within range of the Spaniard's guns, all left 
her but the seven who had been chosen. Then 
for a time the darkness hid her completely, until 
at last the signal gun waked the slumbering hell 
of the harbor's mouth. There was an instant roar 
of cannonading, and Powell from the launch and 
the watchers from the fleet saw the dreadful light 



A NEW HERO OF AN OLD TYPE 24 1 

of the firing and even, for a moment, the dark hulk 
of the Merrimac passing onward to her doom. 
The men in the launch could hear the noise 
of the torpedoes, but it was not until the swift 
tropical daybreak came that they could see the 
masts of the Merrimac standing up out of the 
channel, beyond the point, the Estrella battery, 
where Hobson had said he would sink her. 
But the launch waited in vain for the beating 
of the oars of the returning heroes. In the after- 
noon, to the Admiral, pacing his quarter-deck, 
came the messenger of the knightly Cervera to 
let him know that they lived. 

It was not the scientific aspect of this exploit 
which made so strong an appeal to us all. That 
was interesting, no doubt ; but the human side of 
it was, as Carlyle might say, a far greater matter. 
Its chief interest and value is in its oneness with 
the historical type of daring made familiar by 
other English and American seamen whose 
names were instantly on our lips. Three such 
names of Americans were brought forward with 
an especial aptness : Decatur, Somers, and 
Gushing. The exploits of these three were all 
directed against a blockaded enemy. Decatur 
entered the harbor of Tripoli in the ketch Intrepidy 



242 A NEW HERO OF AN OLD TYPE 

boarded the Philadelphia under the fire of many 
guns, overcame her crew, burnt her, and escaped 
without the loss of a man. Into the same harbor, 
shortly after, went Somers, also on the Intrepid^ 
now turned into a mere floating bomb, meaning to 
explode her among the huddled ships of the enemy. 
But fate was against him. Before he reached 
the inner harbor, the Intrepid blew up : whether 
from an enemy's shot, or by the act of her 
own commander, or from chance, we shall never 
know, for none came back to tell. _ Gushing, 
from the squadron blockading the Carolina coast 
in 1864, went up the river Roanoke in a launch, 
with seven volunteers, to destroy the Confederate 
ram Albemarle. Standing in the prow of his 
little vessel, he approached the iron-clad monster 
under a rain of bullets. Finding his way barred 
by a boom of logs, he drove the launch full tilt at 
the obstacle, slided over it, and then deliberately 
swung a torpedo under the ram, sunk her, leaped 
into the river, and finally escaped with his life. 
Of these four desperate enterprises, including 
Hobson's, only one failed completely, and that, 
for all we know, may have failed from some cause 
that could not have been foreseen. In the other 
three, the reasonableness of daring to the utter- 



A NEW HERO OF AN OLD TYPE 243 

most was proved by the event. To attempt a 
comparison of the four young heroes would be 
both useless and vain. Each measured his devo- 
tion by the poet's standard : — 

" Give all thou canst ; high Heaven neglects the lore 
Of nicely calculated less and more." 

But a longer retrospect would be equally appro- 
priate. It might go back to the very beginnings 
of our national life : to Paul Jones and the Bon 
Homme Richard ; to Washington himself on the 
icy Delaware. We need not «top even there. 
Our fancy wanders on to the beginnings of Eng- 
land's sea power, when the might of Spain was not 
cabined in blockaded harbors, but flaunted forth 
in Armadas. Ralegh or Drake were as good a 
peg for a comparison as Gushing or Somers. It 
leads us even beyond history, into the legends 
and mythology of the North. For what was this 
at Santiago but the whole warfare of our race in 
little } What was it the watchers saw from the fleet 
but the immemorial ship that disappears into the 
unknown } What, but the young Siegfried enter- 
ing the cave of the dragon } What, but Arthur 
passing into the dying day t To peer into the; 
soul of this high-fortuned youth is to feel the 



244 A NEW HERO OF AN OLD TYPE 

higher mood of the race, in which all the wonders 
of our past have been wrought out. It is to lean 
upon the strength which shall fight the battles of 
this Republic so long as it survives and battles are 
to fight. 



VI. SHIFTING THE WHITE 
MAN'S BURDEN 



VI 

SHIFTING THE WHITE MAN'S 
BURDEN 

Is Mason and Dixon's line still a boundary 
line ? That question must come into many men's 
minds the day after a presidential election, when 
it appears that the South has gone one way and 
practically all the rest of the country another. 
We may, in fact, put the matter more strongly 
still, and say that the South votes on one ques- 
tion and the rest of the country on another, or 
others. Certainly, there is a very real sense in 
which the historic line does still separate those 
Americans who can, from those who apparently 
cannot, enjoy their political birthright to the full. 

That such is the case, and that Southerners 
themselves realize the situation as they have 
not heretofore, has been borne in upon me by 
much free talk with men of all classes from the 
Potomac to the Rio Grande : with legislators and 
judges, with the chairmen of state committees, 
with congressmen and senators, with clergymen 
and lawyers and business men, and with the 

247 



248 SHIFTING THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN 

man on the street corner. The sense of it, the 
restiveness under it, which all intelligent and 
thoughtful Southerners display, is particularly 
striking in men of the old ruling class. One 
such man, who as a boy served in the Confeder- 
ate army, who as a young man led in the strug- 
gle against the carpet-baggers, who for years has 
belonged to the comparatively small group which 
controls the Democratic party machinery of his 
state, and who now holds a high state office, 
confessed to me with genuine sadness in. his 
voice that he did not expect to live long enough 
to vote as he believes on national questions. 
It was his prayer that his sons might some 
day have a privilege denied to him. This feel- 
ing, even before men were willing to express 
it, began to have its effects in Southern politics. 
And it is in part responsible for what is doing 
now. 

The main thing doing now is something which 
began ten years ago in Mississippi and which in 
a few years, unless all signs fail, will have worked 
itself out in every state where the blacks are 
nearly so numerous as the whites. Mississippi, 
by a constitutional amendment passed in 1890, 
legalized that disfranchisement of the bulk of 



SHIFTING THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN 249 

her negro citizens which was accomplished fact 
already, and had been so for years. South 
CaroHna, in 1895, by an amendment somewhat 
different from Mississippi's, did practically the 
same thing. Louisiana followed in 189/, and 8 
North Carolina in 19CX). Virginia and Alabama 
have fallen into line. Even Maryland has taken 
up the plan. 

What is the conviction or impulse that started 
the movement .? What is the true character of 
the change itself.? Is there any good reason 
to regard it as a solution, or as fn any wise lead- 
ing up to the solution, of the problem which we 
have so long debated and compromised and fought 
over.'* Is it another crime, another blunder sure 
to prove as disastrous as a crime, or are we on 
the right track at last.!* 

An increasing number, but still far too small 
a number of Southerners, are asking these things 
of themselves and their fellows with a deep and 
painful sense of responsibility. Northern men 
are asking them, too, but in no such imperious 
tones as they formerly used. The feeling of 
responsibility seems, in fact, to have strength- 
ened in the men of the South as the feeling of 
helpless disapproval has taken hold of Northern 



250 SHIFTING THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN 

men. Congress, by refusing to take the disfran- 
chisement movement into account in passing the 
reapportionment act of 1901, practically gave the 
Southerners a free hand for the time being ; and 
the faintness of the protest from the North ex- 
hibits a state of public opinion there utterly 
without parallel in recent history. Every attempt 
from the outside to fix the relations between 
black men and white men in the South has 
either been completely negatived or has had re- 
sults wholly unlike those it aimed at. So nowa- 
days, though the Northern philanthropist still 
gives money to educational and other charitable 
enterprises to help the blacks, and though the 
Northern reformer still denounces, the respon- 
sible public men of the North are disinclined 
to interfere. 

We cannot understand what the Southerners 
are doing unless we remind ourselves that the 
negro question is only one side, and not the 
most important side, of the Southern question. 
The main thing is not what to do for the negro, 
but what to do for the white man living among 
negroes. That, certainly, is the Southerners' 
point of view, and it is not unreasonable. More 
numerous, and of a race whose capacity for civili- 



SHIFTING THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN 2$! 

zation and for self-government is amply proved, 
why should they be held of less account than 
the representatives of a race which has never, 
unaided, shown itself capable either of civiliza- 
tion or of self-government ? Shall we spend all 
our thought on strengthening the weak, and 
have no care of the strong P^ 

Depressing as the Southern negro is to the 
thoughtful traveller, the illiterate Southern white 
man is more depressing still. On many a lonely 
highway they pass each other ; on many a village 
street corner they mutely reproach each other ; 
sometimes, face to face in public conveyances, 
they stare at each other in helpless antagonism, 
felt, perhaps, but not understood. To overcome 
that antagonism, to save both together, would 
be an achievement sufficient to make a man's 
name illustrious forever with Lincoln's. To 
lift up one without the other is itself no 
mean enterprise. The disfranchisement move- 
ment, now completing with constitutional con- 
ventions what the Ku Klux began, appears on 

1 The comparison with the Philippine situation, attempted dur- 
ing the campaign of 1901, was far fetched. The weaker race is 
here the alien, however involuntary its original intrusion; the 
disturbing element in the population, not the main body of the 
people. 



252 SHIFTING THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN 

the surface to be an attempt merely to strike 
down one politically, leaving the other as he 
was before. 

It is a mistaken view of the history of slavery 
in America which represents that institution as 
battling only against the public opinion of the 
outside world, and finally yielding only because 
it was attacked from without. It was the inter- 
nal weakness of the slave system — its economic, 
political, intellectual, and moral unfitness to sur- 
vive — that brought it into collision with the 
forces that destroyed it. From the beginning, 
it had within it the seeds of death. To under- 
stand its downfall, we must study the decay 
within, and not merely the hostility without. 
And so, too, of the race question to-day. The 
only fruitful study of it is from the inside ; and 
such a study will be inconclusive unless it take 
into account things which cannot be set down 
in figures or arrayed in tables and diagrams. We 
may exhibit with figures the material progress 
both races have made since the whites regained 
control in the seventies. The state of education 
also has been frequently set forth with reason- 
able clearness. As to the political situation, we 
have abundance of statistics showing that, vol- 



SHIFTING THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN 253 

untarily or involuntarily, the negroes forego their 
citizenly rights wherever, by reason of their 
numbers, they might control. These things, 
however, help us little unless we realize how 
they are based in the human nature of both 
races and how they react upon both. 

The suppression of negro votes, whether by vio- 
lence, intimidation, or mere trickery, has not been 
common to the whole South. It has been con- 
fined to portions of certain states — particularly 
the ** Black Belt " of the Cotton states, the richer 
agricultural regions in other states, and the cities 
generally. These, however, are the very quarters 
in which the political control of the South was 
lodged before the Civil War, partly because they 
profited most by the constitutional provision allow- 
ing representation to three-fifths of the slaves, 
partly because they were inhabited by the most 
intelligent and masterful Southerners of those 
days. It was the survivors of that class who led 
the way out of bondage after reconstruction, and 
once more gained for themselves the foremost 
places in Southern society. Their leadership, 
readily accepted at the time, was in large measure 
justified by the ability and fidelity they displayed 
in party conventions and committees and in pub- 



254 SHIFTING THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN 

lie office. Praetising the most rigid economy, 
they brought the finances of the state govern- 
ments, exploited as they had been by the carpet- 
baggers, into a surprisingly good condition, and 
they did the like for the counties and the towns. 
So intimately were politics at that time related to 
the welfare of individuals and families, so necessary 
was honesty and ability in office, that the strong- 
est sort of public sentiment demanded the putting 
forward of good men, and there was little intrigu- 
ing among the whites. For some years, in fact, 
the state and local governments were administered 
as capably and honestly as, for the most part, they 
had been administered before the war ; and that is 
saying much. 

But the wrong at the bottom of the system, like 
the wrong in slavery, began very soon to work 
itself out. The carpet-bagger disappeared. The 
negroes made less and less effort to get a share of 
power, contenting themselves perforce with such 
morsels of Federal patronage as were thrown to 
them when their white leaders were compensated 
for helping to nominate successful candidates in 
Republican national conventions. The Republi- 
can party in the South broke into factions and 
ceased to be really dangerous except in spots. 



SHIFTING THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN 255 

The old ruling class, though shorn of its wealth, 
and though its ascendency in national politics was 
gone forever, was just as strongly intrenched in 
power at home as it was in i860. Moreover, its 
power was as clearly bottomed on the freedman as 
it had ever been bottomed on the slave. The 
"black" counties, represented in legislatures and 
party conventions according to an apportionment 
based on the theory that negroes were voters, had 
an undue ascendency over the *' white " counties, 
just as they had before the war. This ascendency 
was in fact heigfitened by the granting of repre- 
sentation to two-fifths of the negroes, not counted 
under slavery. 

Two consequences of these conditions led di- 
rectly to the clamor for disfranchisement. One 
was the loss of respect for the ballot-box among 
the whites who profited most by the suppression 
of negro votes, and the inevitable extension of 
unfair practices into their own party primaries and 
conventions. The other was the discontent of 
white men not of the ruling class, stimulated and 
enlarged by the wider discontent of the farming 
class throughout the country. The antagonism of 
the white counties to the black counties had run 
through the political history of the South from the 



256 SHIFTING THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN 

beginning. The granger movement, culminating 
in South Carolina in the victory of Tillman, when 
the new men actually got control of the dominant 
party, and elsewhere in the rise of a party which, 
whatever names it took in different states, was 
always the party of discontent with the existing 
order, was a new development, and its peculiar 
importance in the South has never been properly 
emphasized. 

In other parts of the country, this movement 
was distinctly a protest against industrial condi- 
tions, and against the "money power" in particu- 
lar. In the South also it had, at first, somewhat 
of that character ; but very soon it developed 
there into an uprising, rather political than social, 
against the groups of men who controlled the 
Democratic machines, and thereby controlled the 
entire political life, of the several states. It 
became a fight of the outs against the ins. The 
outs were made up chiefly of small farmers in the 
richer agricultural regions, up to that time ordi- 
narily inclined to follow the lawyers and planters, 
and the bulk of the citizens of the upland regions, 
in which most of the " white " counties lay. The 
ins consisted of the office-holding class, of conser- 
vatives who dreaded any division among the whites 



SHIFTING THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN 25/ 

as the chief danger to society, and in general of 
such as found in the existing order the means 
of welfare or a stay to their pride. 

In South CaroHna, where the outs won by get- 
ting possession of the machine, the retirement of 
such men as Hampton and Butler, to make way 
for Tillman and Irby, marked a revolution in the 
internal pohtics of the little state deeper than the 
changes of 1776 and i860. In North Carolina, 
somewhat later, by combining with the Republi- 
cans, the party of discontent overthrew the Demo- 
cratic machine at the polls. That victory resulted 
in such misgovernment, particularly in counties 
and towns, that North Carolina, formerly less 
inclined to discriminate against negro voters than 
other Southern states, has gone even farther than 
South Carolina dared to go in the direction of dis- 
franchisement. In the other states, the uprising 
against the old leaders was either defeated or com- 
promised with, and the chief of the means em- 
ployed to defeat it was the negro vote in those 
counties where negroes were most numerous. 
The contest revealed clearly the basis of the 
power of the ruling class ; it threw into clearer 
light than ever before the political antagonism 
between the "white" and "black" counties; 



258 SHIFTING THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN 

and it also made clear the impossibility of having 
one code of political morality in dealing with 
negroes and another code in deaUng with white 
men. 

The negroes had taken but little part in the con- 
troversy, but their votes, whether cast or not, had 
been of the utmost importance. The contention 
that the whites must not divide lest the blacks get 
into power lost much of its force, for the whites 
had divided and the negroes had not come into 
power. Nevertheless, the feeling against negro 
suffrage was heightened rather than diminished, 
for it was seen that negro votes, even though they 
were not cast, or were counted to suit the Demo- 
cratic managers, were still an obstacle to the 
popular will. If the actual exercise of the suf- 
frage by negroes threatened property and order, 
the suppression of their votes brought about con- 
ditions destructive of equality among the whites. 
In other words, whether exercised or not, the legal 
right of the negro to vote was seen to be a stum- 
bling-block in the way of democracy. 

The discontent of thoughtful and high-minded 
citizens with conditions which seemed to necessi- 
tate deception and fraud was already manifest. 
There was a marked tendency among such men 



SHIFTING THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN 259 

to withdraw from active party work, either volun- 
tarily or because less squeamish aspirants for 
leadership had, in the nature of things, an ad- 
vantage over them. This discontent, however, 
was not alone adequate to bring about a change. 
It needed to be reinforced by the discontent of 
the less thoughtful but far larger class of outs 
who made up the bulk of the Tillman party in 
South Carolina and the Kolb party in Alabama, 
and who, in every state, if not conciliated, drifted 
for the most part into populism. 

Moreover, as I* have said, Southerners are restive 
under the restraints which keep them from enter- 
ing actively and fearlessly into the larger political 
life of the Republic. Americanism is growing in 
the South. Pride in the flag, pride in the pros- 
perity and prestige of the United States, is surely 
heightening. Industrial development has brought 
many regions, hitherto remote and separate, into 
close business relations with the North. Merchants 
and bankers are constantly visiting New York and 
other eastern cities. Metropolitan newspapers are 
read everywhere. Women's clubs are active in 
every large town. The plantation no longer sets 
the standard of social usage and intellectual life. 
The whole South is too much alive to outer things, 



260 SHIFTING THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN 

too cognizant of a civilization ampler than its own, 
not to feel keenly the limitations upon its partici- 
pation in national political contests. Its political 
solidarity, once a source of pride, is now seldom 
vaunted ; often er, it is explained and apologized 
for. The negro is, of course, the sole explanation, 
the sole apology. To get rid of him politically, 
and to do it by law, once for all, is the only 
remedy proposed. 

But whenever there is discussion of specific 
plans the illiterate white man is bound to come 
in. Mississippi provides for him by permitting 
the registrars to decide that he understands the 
state constitution and the negro does not. The 
Supreme Court of the United States has sustained 
that provision, but obviously it merely transfers 
the task of suppressing negro votes from the in- 
spectors at the polls to the registrars of voters. 
A division among the whites might still, at any 
time, lead to the registering of negroes. The 
change has not perceptibly bettered Mississippi's 
politics, and there was no good reason to believe 
it would. North Carolina and Louisiana provide 
for the illiterate white by admitting him to regis- 
tration if he or his ancestors could vote before 
the Reconstruction Acts were passed. The consti- 



SHIFTING THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN 26 1 

tutionality of this plan has not yet been passed 
upon. South Carolina, of the four states which 
have already acted, seems to have made the least 
elaborate provision for him. As yet, however, 
no Southern state has adopted a simple educational 
qualification for the suffrage, and in none of the 
states which are still to act is there any probabil- 
ity that such a qualification will be fixed. Un- 
questionably, there is a strong preference for that 
straightforward course among thoughtful South- 
erners, but the practical politicians fight shy of 
it, contending openly that illiteracy frequently 
does not imply unfitness for citizenship, and con- 
fessing privately that the fate of the plan, if 
submitted to popular vote, would be extremely 
doubtful. Another plan is to debar negroes from 
public office by constitutional enactment, on the 
theory that office-holding is not one of the rights 
secured to them by the Fourteenth Amendment. 
One eminent Southern public man, after long 
study of the question, can find no solution of it 
save in the repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment 
and the absolute denial to the negro, as a negro, 
of the right to vote. A justice of a Southern 
Supreme Court so far coincides with him as to 
declare that no remedy will be effective which 



262 SHIFTING THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN 

simply transfers fraud from the ballot box to the 
statute book. 

Such is the case in which Southern white men 
find themselves, and such the latest movement 
looking toward betterment. Confessedly, it is 
not a movement to help the negro. Yet its ad- 
vocates maintain that its effects on the negro, 
incidental though they be, will prove beneficial 
rather than the reverse. What good, they ask, 
has the negro ever got from participation in poli- 
tics, even in those regions where his vote is 
counted .'* A few exceptional negroes, like Bruce 
and Douglas, have shown themselves fit to play 
a part in public affairs, but the great majority of 
negro politicians are declared, by such representa- 
tives of their own race as Booker T. Washington 
and William H. Councill, to be doing more harm 
than good. To get the negro out of politics and 
into remunerative work, so these men say, is one 
of the first steps toward true progress. 

But while men like Washington do not cry out 
against the denial of the ballot to the illiterate and 
unintelligent mass of their fellows, they do protest 
against the methods by which it has been accom- 
plished in defiance of law and the plans tried or 
proposed for legalizing it. Granting that a large 



SHIFTING THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN 263 

proportion, perhaps a majority, of the negroes are 
unfit for office and unready for the suffrage, 
they nevertheless object to the exclusion of unfit 
negroes by any test or before any tribunal 
which will not similarly exclude unfit white men. 
In effect, the best representatives of both races 
are at one on the question of what should be 
done. But the main thing is, what can be done, 
what will be done. 

The tribunal, and not the law, is the real diffi- 
culty. The rulers of Southern states and counties 
and towns do at the present time, whenever they 
deem it necessary, deny to negroes the political 
power which the law confers upon them. That 
course is in accord with the public sentiment of 
the communities in which it is followed. The 
practices thus established, the habit of mind thus 
contracted, will not disappear at once with the 
conditions in which they originated. When a 
disease has made a certain progress, it cannot be 
cured merely by removing the cause. Negro 
suffrage has vitiated the political morality of the 
South, but it does not follow that to disfranchise 
the bulk of the negroes is to purify politics. How 
to get tribunals which will treat negroes and 
white men alike is a problem not yet solved, and 



264 SHIFTING THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN 

it will not be solved until public opinion shall 
demand that they be treated alike. 

The disfranchisement movement, then, is very 
far from being a solution of the race question in 
its political phase. It does not leave the negro 
in a position which either those who believe in 
his capacity for development or those who are 
governed entirely by the prejudice against him will 
be content to regard as permanent. The law will 
discriminate against him so far as the law-makers 
dare, and registration boards will be governed by 
the same public sentiment which now justifies the 
practices of inspectors at the polls. He will have 
the same shadowy political equality which he now 
has, and which to some minds seems worse for 
him, as it is doubtless worse for the whites, than 
if the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments 
were repealed and his inequality plainly declared 
by law. As to the whites, the temptation to 
questionable practices, or rather to practices un- 
questionably bad, will be diminished, but not 
entirely removed. They will be freer to divide 
among themselves, but there is little prospect 
of their immediately abandoning that provincial 
and defensive attitude toward their country which 
so oppresses their leading minds. 



SHIFTING THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN 26$ 

On the whole, however, the movement is pro- 
gressive rather than reactionary. It is a recogni- 
tion of actual conditions, an envisagement of facts 
hitherto never frankly acknowledged. It is an 
attempt, half hearted, perhaps, but not wholly dis- 
honest, to bring the political life of the South into 
accord with the written law by changing the law. 
It will tend, therefore, to heighten the respect for 
the law. It is, moreover, the work of the better 
class of politicians, acting in obedience to public 
sentiment. One is favorably impressed with it if 
one considers only who are in favor of it and 
who are against it. Whether or not it is a victory 
for good government, it seems to be, in the main, 
a victory for good men. 

But the problem is of free government rather 
than of good government, and it cannot be sepa- 
rated from the greater problem of which it is a 
part. The disfranchisement movement does not 
aim to alter the general attitude of the two 
races toward each other; and so long as that 
attitude remains the same. Southern politics will 
remain unlike the politics of the North. The 
trouble is not in laws and institutions; it is in 
men. It is not in the organization of the body 
politic, but in its composition. When de Tocque- 



266 SHIFTING THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN 

ville declared that he could explain every one of 
the differences between the North and South 
by the institution of slavery, he overstated the 
importance of the institution. He magnified the 
evil of slavery, and neglected the slave. 

When due account is taken of all the blunders 
we have made in dealing with the negro, — and 
they have been many, — of all the crimes we 
have committed against him, — and they have 
been flagrant, — it remains true that not they, 
but he himself, by his mere presence here, is 
the main source of our present-day perplexities. 
The political isolation of the South, like its sepa- 
rateness in other respects, is due to the negro, 
and to the inevitable effects on white men of 
living among negroes. It is thirty-five years 
since the slaves were freed, but the shadow of 
Africa still rests upon the land. 

At the rear of a shop in a thriving city in the 
newly developed mineral region of Alabama I 
saw, at midday, a burly negro stretched on his 
back, eyes shut, mouth open, wrapt in peaceful 
slumber. On the street corner outside stood a 
white countryman, awake but utterly idle, a vague, 
childlike inquiry in his face, watching whatsoever 
passed on the other side of the street. What 



SHIFTING THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN 267 

passed was characteristic of the New South ; but 
the sleeping negro, the listless poor white, bur- 
dened my mind in spite of the stir of business 
about them, and the smoke of furnaces and fac- 
tories, and the tooting of engines in the distance. 
Not even material progress and prosperity, wel- 
come and creditable as they are, can satisfy us 
concerning the civilization in which those two 
^figures keep their places. 

But there are genuinely hopeful signs : signs of 
progress in the two directions in which alone true 
and lasting betterment can reasonably be hoped 
for. Hampton and Tuskegee on the one hand, 
the Montgomery conferences on the other, are in- 
finitely more encouraging than anything doing or 
anything that can possibly be done at Washing- 
ton or in state legislatures or in constitutional 
conventions. For democracy rests on the sense, 
if not the reality, of equality among men. Com- 
munities made up of races so disposed toward 
each other as the Southern whites and blacks 
now are cannot live up to democratic standards, 
no matter what their laws may be. To alter the 
white man's attitude toward the negro, to rid 
the negro of those characteristics which humanly 
necessitate, although they may not justify, the 



268 SHIFTING THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN 

white man's attitude toward him — these are the 
two things that must be done. 

The difficulty of these two tasks is not to be 
underestimated, — not even in view of the tran- 
scendent importance, the necessity, of getting 
them done. As to the negro, it will not be 
enough if, imitative above all things, he fashion 
his life outwardly after the white man's. He 
must be inwardly remade. He must, in his own 
mind, erect himself into the full stature of the 
manhood that beats down his own. As to the 
white man, he must unlearn the lesson of his 
own imperious, masterful dominance. He must, 
somehow, learn to believe that there is that in 
the negro which the negro's habit of servility 
belies. He must obey that higher law which 
still, above all statutes and constitutions, impels 
with an obligation which no written law can 
ever make compelling. The obligation is to for- 
bearance, to gentleness, to sympathy ; to the 
entire fairness which shall not take account of 
rights ; to the brotherhood which alone can 
make of equality before the law anything but 
the hideous mockery it is to-day. 

Is either of those tasks humanly possible .^ 
Which is the more hopeful } Which the more 



SHIFTING THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN 269 

important? Both, clearly, are educational. Edu- 
cation of some sort is the only device yet sug- 
gested to accomplish either. 

The common belief is that of the two the 
task of changing the negroes by education is 
the more hopeful, since there is among them a 
greater density of ignorance, and so the possi- 
bility of a greater progress. It is also held to 
be the more important, on the theory that it 
alone will make possible a different attitude 
of the whites toward the blacks. Tuskegee and 
Hampton are therefore regarded as the best of 
all the agencies at work. 

They are, indeed, wholly admirable; they are 
infinitely deserving. Nevertheless, I am drawn 
to the conviction that the other of the two tasks 
is, on the whole, the more hopeful, the more 
practical, the more important. I feel sure it is 
freer from any shadow of a doubt that it will 
be vain, even if it be accomplished. We know, 
and know precisely, what there is to gain by 
educating white men of English stocks. We do 
not know precisely how much there is to gain 
by educating a large negro population. I am 
speaking now of the immediate gain, without 
reference to the race problem. We know far- 



2/0 SHIFTING THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN 

ther, as to the race problem itself, that it is 
vastly less perplexing when educated white men 
deal with negroes, whether educated or illiter- 
ate, than when ignorant white men deal with 
negroes of either class. Substitute for the hun- 
dreds of thousands of Southern whites who 
cannot read, and the greater numbers whose 
ability to read and write is the sum total of 
their culture, an equal body of educated whites, 
correspondingly more thrifty, cleanly, aspiring, 
reasonable, intelligent, — and we know that edu- 
cation means these things with men of English 
stocks, — and there is not one of us who doubts 
that the situation will be immeasurably bettered. 
Leave the whites as they are, and educate the 
negroes, and no candid mind will be free from 
doubts and fears of the result. To educate both 
races up to the limit of their capacities is, of 
course, the complete ideal. To educate the 
whites is the safest, the easiest, the wisest first 
step to take. 

Facing back over Southern history is not 
cheering. Facing forward is trying to the 
stoutest-hearted optimism. The fallacy in most 
of our debating is, in fact, the fallacy of wilful 
optimism. We have constantly assumed that 



SHIFTING THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN 2/1 

there was a solution of each problem as it pre- 
sented itself, a clearly right thing to do, which 
could also be done. There is still no occasion 
to despair. But we must take up every new 
plan with the chastening knowledge that most 
of our devices have failed; that nothing which 
can be quickly accomplished will go deep enough 
to last ; that no sudden illumination will ever 
come, nor any swift breaking of the clouds shed 
sunlight on our shadowed land. Africa still 
mocks America from her jungles. ** Still," she 
jeers, "with the dense darkness of my igno- 
rance, I confound your enlightenment. Still, 
with my sloth, I weigh down the arms of your 
industry. Still, with my supineness, I hang 
upon the wings of your aspiration. And in 
the very heart of your imperial young republic 
I have planted, sure and deep, the misery of 
this ancient curse I bear." 



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